EPA-1316 - New insights on studying of social representations towards illness

Abstract

Introduction Social representations occupied a place apart in psychology both by the problems it raised and the scale of phenomena with wich it deals. Objective This survey examined the potential results of Greek's illness's social representations. Aim To tested the link between social representations of illness and psychopathological behaviours. Materials and Methods A cross-sectional design was performed. 280 healthy individuals (mean age± sd: 40.9±11.5, range:19-65 yrs)participated to the present study from different region of Greece. All the participants completed a) a questionaire for the recording of illness's social representations based on free associations and b) The Symptom Checklist 90-revised (SCL-90R) along with a quaistionnaire concerning socialdemographic characteristics. Results Multivariate analysis was performed. No significant differences on social representations were observed in terms of sex, age and marital status. Chronic disease was found to contribute directly in the development of illness representation (F(1)=5.063, p=.025). Thus, GLM analysis was found strong association between illness representations and developing of somatization (p=.013), interpersonal sensitivity (p=.033), depression (p=.005), anxiety (.001), hostility (p=.004), phobic anxiety (p=.005), paranoid ideation (p=.045), and psychoticism (p=.011). Conclusions The results of the present study highlighted that social representations are not a quiet thing. But more crucially support the idea of using the development of social representations in terms of therapeutic process.