Sociedade de consumo e corpo: uma análise das representações sociais dos jovens universitários da Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This study aimed to characterize the social representations of university students in relation to consumer and body society. For the theoretical basis, we used the perspective of social representations, designed to diagnose the attitudes of this focus group regarding the consumer society and the body to diagnose the burden of these experiences that the consumer society has in these social representations. In this logic, social representations have the power to gather themes in a particular group, making possible the construction of a common collective narrative. The objective of this work is to describe and understand how this individual narrative has relations with the social representations and the consumption society of the academics of the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, and that is also represented in the body, the present research contributes to the studies in administration, more specifically in the field of marketing and studies in the area of consumer behavior. In this way, two hundred and seventeen questionnaires were analyzed through the content analysis technique proposed by Bardin (2011). The research is based on the Social representations studied by Moscovici (1978). The choice of having as theoretical scope the Social Representations is for it to analyze symbolic elements that individuals express through the use of language, whether verbal (oral or written), gestural, sound, silent, figurative, documentary or directly provoked (Franco, 2011). Other authors were used as a basis for the categorization of consumption in relation to the body of the Young University students. Finally, it was possible to identify the components of social representations proposed by Moscovici in the collected data.