REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS DE ADOLESCENTES DA REDE PÚBLICA E PRIVADA SOBRE OS DIREITOS HUMANOS

Abstract

In this paper, representation of Human Rights by teenagers in middle school and high school are verified, considering psychosocial and sociodemographic variables. The emphasis chosen is the Social Representation Theory, as written by Willem Doise (1998). A field study composed of 181 middle school students and 160 high school students, 55.42% of which study in private schools and 44.58% in public ones. The age of the participants varied between 12 and 18 years old. 43.99% of the participants were male. 41.65% of the students declared themselves as catholics, 41.93% as other religions, and 16.42% as having no religion. Participants were tasked with answering a question about human rights: “Human Rights have been a discussion topic for a while. According to you, what are those rights?”. Additionally, they also answered sociodemographic (gender, age and education level) and psychosocial (religion and education network) questions. The software used to analyse the corpus was Iramuteq, and a dendrogram were acquired as a result. The HR dendrogram introduced 4 classifications in which “Fundamental rights of the UDHR”, “Basic social rigths”, “Law as satisfações of personal desires” and “Criticismo of discriminacion in the application of HR”. Beyond those results, there were anchorings between different classes in sociodemographic variables. The Factorial Correspondence Analysis (CFA) brought the positive pole “HR hedonistic individuals” on te vertical axis and the negative pole “Objective social rigths”; on the horizontal axis the positive pole “Equality” ando n the negative pole “Gender discriminacion in the appication of human rigths”. Human Rights and their anchorings were discussed considering previous researches on right representation and the anchorings verified in them.