Taking stock of the literature in the thematic field of “Social Representations, Community & Health”

Introduction: Since the birth of the Theory of Social Representations (SRT), the subject of Health and Community have been one of the areas of interest, application and development of this theory (Herzlich, 1969; Jodelet, 1976, 1991; de Rosa, 1987). The publications in this field have generated the need for a review and systematization of the literature, as well as a critical analysis of the development of the SRT. (de Rosa, 1994, 2002, 2008, 2013a, 2013b, 2016; de Rosa and Dryjanska, 2016). The present study is a part of the EC-funded project (ITN-People MSCA-IDP 2013, no. 6072799 http://www.europhd.eu/SoReComJointIDP) on Social Representations and Communication, led by de Rosa, within the framework of the European/International Joint Ph.D. in this supra-disciplinary field (de Rosa, 2015, 2016). The whole project is articulated in three main foci: 1. Paradigmatic approaches to the theory (structural, socio-dynamic, dialogical, narrative, anthropological, modelling); 2. Geo-cultural areas of the theory production and dissemination (Europe, Latin America, North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania) and 3. Thematic Research Domains (science, education, economy, marketing, environment, health, community, politics, identity, minority influence, also taking into account the taxonomy: polemic, hegemonic, emancipated social representations). Objectives: The specific focus of this contribution is: “Social Representations, Health and Community”. Two objectives guided this study: • firstly, to perform a geo-mapping of the TRS in different areas of the Health and Community, in different geo-cultural contexts in the world. • secondly, to perform a Meta-Theoretical Analysis of literature about Social Representations and the thematic focus of the Community and Health. Methods: The bibliographic sources of the data used for this research and the research tool for analyzing them (the Grid for the meta-theoretical analysis, designed by de Rosa in 1994 and update: v.2014) were extracted from the specialized repositories of the SoReCom "A.S.de Rosa"@-library. The sample consisted of a sub-corpus of 508 bibliographic references related to the themes of community, health, and the SRT. Including different types of both theoretical and empirical texts of different authors from multiple parts of the world, through more than 50 years of development of the theory. For this theme, Meta-theoretical analysis included literature that was published between the years of 1972-2015. Three analyses were conducted for this study. 1. A Geo-mapping for the dissemination of the theory of Social representation in the world, in relation to the thematic focus of the community and health. 2. A descriptive analysis of the different variables for analysis Meta-theory that is part of The Grid for the goal-theoretical analysis. 3. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) for a group of active variables and stock that are part of The Grid for the Meta-theoretical. Results: Analyzed resources are mainly classified into journal articles (68.9%), presentations at conferences (23.6%) and book chapters (6.7%). Based on the first author’s institutional affiliation country/continents, results show Europe and Latin America are still the most prominent geo-cultural areas for the production of the literature in the field of Health and community with about the same proportions: 49.6% and 48.0%, respectively. Performing MCA. we found five factors which show the contribution of “active variables” linked to the methodological profile; the theoretical constructs related to SRT; the reference to theoretical constructs and/or other theories related to SRT and Community; the social representations of health and community; and health and social representations Spatial-temporal context, and the significant positioning on the factorial space of the variables corresponding to the rich set of meta-data detected through the first part of the Grid (like language and years of publications by decades, the type of publications, the theoretical/empirical nature of the contributions, the geo-cultural anchoring as derived from the first author’s institutional affiliation country/continent, the inclusion or not in the bibliometric databases (web of Science and Scopus-Elsevier) with the related bibliometric indexes when present categorized by ranked values, etc. One of the main results confirms that the theme of health in Latin America is correlated to empirical studies still based on generic theoretical constructs, giving more attention to the applied value of the study, rather than to their contribution for the theory development; while in the literature produced in Europe, is correlated with theoretical studies and specific constructs of the SRT. Conclusions: The theme of Health and Community has represented one of the most important areas of application for the SRT developed in the last decades (de Rosa, 1994, 2002, 2008, 2013a, 2013b, 2016; de Rosa and D'Ambrosio, 2003a, 2003b, 2008; de Rosa and Dryjanska, 2016). The relationship between these topics reflects the plurality of methods used and their respective contributions to the understanding of common knowledge related to actual social objects in the specificity of their geo-cultural contexts. We wish that the times are mature for welcoming a more integrated route of knowledge to social representations – as proposed by the “modeling approach” (de Rosa, 2013b, 2013c, 20014), both in terms of paradigmatic and related multi-methodological options in a domain of study, like the one on Health and Community where the complexity of interrelated dimensions and high applied relevance claims for empirical researchers designs adequate to the supra-disciplinary vision of the Social Representation theory, as conceived by his founder