Social Representations of Nursing Students About the Sexuality of People Living With HIV

Free word association (FWA) has been used to analyze cultures, thoughts, beliefs, and demographics across various fields. FWAs are a widely used scientific tool to quickly view a subject's beliefs, biases, and opinions that are often repressed or difficult to detect in short interviews or surveys. Here, we explored the relationship between FWA and demographics through neural network analysis. We hypothesized that neural network analysis of FWA could accurately predict a participant's age, gender, first language, and current country based on their FWA responses to a random cue word from a set of 12,292 cues selected from prior FWA studies. Using the "Small World of Words'' dataset containing over 1.2 million FWAs, we created a prediction model and evaluated for accuracy across the four demographic variables. The study employed an existing linguistic neural network, Large Language Model Meta AI 2 (LLaMA 2), which was fine-tuned to predict demographics from FWAs. The trained model demonstrated noteworthy accuracy predicting first language (63.6%), current country (58.4%), and age (median distance of nine years from predicted to actual age), but demonstrated a fluctuating accuracy across generation parameters when predicting gender. Our findings suggest a correlation between FWAs and demographics, aligning with previous research on FWA reflecting geographical differences, cultural beliefs, and age-related patterns. The study demonstrates the potential of using FWA and neural networks to identify demographic information more efficiently than other large scale data collection methods such as surveys.

Objective: to identify and analyze the social representations and their dimensions about peripheral venous catheterization and its maintenance for anesthetic-surgical purposes in women undergoing cesarean section. Method: qualitative study of exploratory-descriptive type grounded by the Theory of Social Representations with the participation of 120 women and carried out in a public hospital in the state of Minas Gerais - Brazil, between 2019 and 2020. Evocations collected by interviews with application of the technique of free association of non-hierarchical words with prototypical analysis and by similarity in the EVOC and IRAMUTEQ software. Results: the present social representation addresses feelings in the behavioral dimension of stress, which are related to insecurity and fear of the pain of the needle, the surgical procedure, and the restriction of movements. Conclusion: the research contributes to a reflection on the need to resize nursing care before the difficulties faced by women in the triple experience of stress: cesarean section; venous catheterization; and the difficulty of performing postpartum care.

This essay is an exploratory study of the uses and gratifications of social networking applications and sites widely utilized by gay men. Based on findings from six different focus groups and intercept interviews with gay and bisexual men, this essay explores the motivations and perceived benefits of social networking sites that allow for the creation of a virtual community of sexual minorities. This paper also considers these technological developments as part of a larger history of gay men communicating with other gay men within a culture where talk about homosexuality is closely policed and often restricted. Through a uses and gratifications approach, this essay discusses the needs and motivations that bring gay men online to social network sites, how they manage multiple identities online and the resulting gratifications of their online activity.

The Geneva gay men's health project : a community-research collaboration to assess and improve the health of gay men in Geneva, Switzerland

BackgroundE-therapies for depression and anxiety rarely account for lesbian and gay users. This is despite lesbians and gay men being at heightened risk of mood disorders and likely to benefit from having access to tailored self-help resources.ObjectiveWe sought to determine how e-therapies for depression and anxiety could be improved to address the therapeutic needs of lesbians and gay men.MethodsWe conducted eight focus groups with lesbians and gay men aged 18 years and older. Focus groups were presented with key modules from the popular e-therapy “MoodGYM”. They were asked to evaluate the inclusiveness and relevance of these modules for lesbians and gay men and to think about ways that e-therapies in general could be modified. The focus groups were analyzed qualitatively using a thematic analysis approach to identify major themes.ResultsThe focus groups indicated that some but not all aspects of MoodGYM were suitable, and suggested ways of improving e-therapies for lesbian and gay users. Suggestions included avoiding language or examples that assumed or implied users were heterosexual, improving inclusiveness by representing non-heterosexual relationships, providing referrals to specialized support services and addressing stigma-related stress, such as “coming out” and experiences of discrimination and harassment. Focus group participants suggested that dedicated e-therapies for lesbians and gay men should be developed or general e-therapies be made more inclusive by using adaptive logic to deliver content appropriate for a user’s sexual identity.ConclusionsFindings from this study offer in-depth guidance for developing e-therapies that more effectively address mental health problems among lesbians and gay men.

Studies of lexical---semantic relations aim to understand the mechanism of semantic memory and the organization of the mental lexicon. However, standard paradigmatic relations such as hypernym and hyponym cannot capture connections among concepts from different parts of speech. WordNet, which organizes synsets (i.e., synonym sets) using these lexical---semantic relations, is rather sparse in its connectivity. According to WordNet statistics, the average number of outgoing/incoming arcs for the hypernym/hyponym relation per synset is 1.33. Evocation, defined as how much a concept (expressed by one or more words) brings to mind another, is proposed as a new directed and weighted measure for the semantic relatedness among concepts. Commonly applied semantic relations and relatedness measures do not seem to be fully compatible with data that reflect evocations among concepts. They are compatible but evocation captures MORE. This work aims to provide a reliable and extendable dataset of concepts evoked by, and evoking, other concepts to enrich WordNet, the existing semantic network. We propose the use of disambiguated free word association data (first responses to verbal stimuli) to infer and collect evocation ratings. WordNet aims to represent the organization of mental lexicon, and free word association which has been used by psycholinguists to explore semantic organization can contribute to the understanding. This work was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, it was confirmed that existing free word association norms can be converted into evocation data computationally. In the second phase, a two-stage association-annotation procedure of collecting evocation data from human judgment was compared to the state-of-the-art method, showing that introducing free association can greatly improve the quality of the evocation data generated. Evocation can be incorporated into WordNet as directed links with scales, and benefits various natural language processing applications.

ABSTRACTGay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) account for more than two thirds of new HIV infections in the U.S., with Black MSM experiencing the greatest burden. Antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can reduce MSM’s vulnerability to HIV infection. Uptake of PrEP has been limited, particularly among racial and ethnic minority MSM. Four semi-structured focus groups with gay and bisexual men and other MSM at risk for HIV infection were convened in Boston and Jackson in late 2013. The analysis plan utilized a within-case, across-case approach to code and analyze emerging themes, and to compare results across the two cities. Participants recruited in Jackson were primarily Black gay men, while Boston participants were mostly non-Hispanic White gay men. Participants in both sites shared concerns about medication side effects and culturally insensitive health care for gay men. Jackson participants described stronger medical mistrust, and more frequently described experiences of anti-gay and HIV related stigma. Multiple addressable barriers to PrEP uptake were described. Information about side effects should be explicitly addressed in PrEP education campaigns. Providers and health departments should address medical mistrust, especially among Black gay and bisexual men and other MSM, in part by training providers in how to provide affirming, culturally competent care. Medicaid should be expanded in Mississippi to cover low-income young Black gay and bisexual men and other MSM.

This study examines the core and outlying representational elements of healthcare constructed by Family Healthcare Program teams in Natal, Brazil, using the theory of social representations and the central core theory. The sample consisted of ninety healthcare practitioners working with this Program, with data collected through free word association, a questionnaire and focus groups. The core representation consists of attention/love and comfort, disclosing different understandings and showing that accumulated knowledge is supported by a view that is close to care-giving. However, traditional values and trivial connotations are maintained, hindering the implementation of more effective interventions in by this Program. The core composition indicated that any capacity-building efforts that try to modify attitudes - and thus the daily practice of these practitioners - must assign high priority to discussions on redefining these elements of attention/love and comfort. They must consider the set of mental, emotional, and practical elaborations as well as explanations arising from daily life that are introduced into the constitution of the social representations under examination, influencing choices and shaping the strategies used by practitioners to provide care.

To analyze social representations from the perspective of the silent zone of health professionals regarding HIV serodifference. This is a qualitative study, based on the theoretical-methodological framework of Social Representations, with the Theory of the Central Nucleus and Mute Zone by Jean Claude Abric. 51 professionals from specialized services from the metropolitan region of a capital in the northeast of Brazil participated, from October to December 2020. Interviews were applied using the free word association replacement technique, with prototypical and similarity analyzes processed in the Iramuteq software. The results showed that the central nucleus demonstrated the veiled presence of stigmas and lack of knowledge when dealing with HIV serodifference, represented by the expressions prejudice, lack of knowledge, fear, insanity, and love. The social representations attributed to the central core are anchored in prejudice, ignorance, fear, and insanity. Such meanings signal the need for improvements in the knowledge of health professionals involved in the health care network, in order to enable the praxis of care, and to confront the stigmas that permeate serodifference and cause distance between partners and health services.

We develop a critique of the social psychological hypothesis that media images of women engaged in same-sex activity have a positive effect on heterosexual men’s general attitudes to lesbians. A content analysis suggests that British print media usually represent lesbians either in news stories that also include gay men, or in entertainment stories. In focus groups, both gay and straight men were presented with photographs of ‘heteroflexible’ representations from the ‘lad mag’ FHMand photographs of ‘real’ lesbians from Gay Times. Men were asked to define what made a woman a real lesbian. Straight men rejected the formulation that there was a single ‘stereotype’ of lesbians in favor of the claim that the FHM images did not represent real lesbians. Gay men came to agree that the heteroflexible women were not identified as lesbian. Our analysis suggests that both gay and straight men perform bounded sexual identities in response to heteroflexible images which are scripted to be attractive to heterosexual men.

Semantic relatedness computation is the task of measuring the degree of relatedness of two concepts. It is a well known problem with applications ranging from computational linguistics to cognitive psychology. In all existing approaches, relatedness is assumed to be symmetric i.e. the relatedness of terms t i and term t j is considered the same as the relatedness of terms t j and t i . However, there are tasks such as free word association, where the association strength assumed to be asymmetric. In free word association, the given term determines the context in which the association strength must be computed. Based on this key observation, the paper presents a new approach to computing term relatedness guided by asymmetric association. The focus of this paper is on using Wikipedia for extracting directional context of each given term and computing the association of input term pair in this context. The proposed approach is generic enough to deal with both symmetric as well as asymmetric relatedness computation problems. Empirical evaluation on multiple benchmark datasets shows encouraging results when our automatically computed relatedness scores are correlated with human judgments.

Shared decision-making is a strategy to achieve health equity by strengthening patient–provider relationships and improve health outcomes. There is a paucity of research examining these factors among patients who identify as sexual or gender minorities and racial/ethnic minorities. Through intrapersonal, interpersonal and societal lenses, this project evaluates the relationship between intersectionality and shared decision-making around anal cancer screening in Black gay and bisexual men, given their disproportionate rates of anal cancer. Thirty semi-structured, one-on-one interviews and two focus groups were conducted during 2016–2017. Participants were asked open-ended questions regarding intersectionality, relationships with healthcare providers and making shared decisions about anal cancer screening. Forty-five individuals participated – 30 in individual interviews and 15 in focus groups. All participants identified as Black and male; 13 identified as bisexual and 32 as gay. Analysis revealed that the interaction of internalised racism, biphobia/homophobia, provider bias and medical apartheid led to reduced healthcare engagement and discomfort with discussing sexual practices, potentially hindering patients from engaging in shared decision-making. Non-judgemental healthcare settings and provider relationships in which patients communicate openly about each aspect of their identity will promote effective shared decision-making about anal cancer screening, and thus potentially impact downstream anal cancer rates.

As trabalhadoras sexuais possuem vivências que suscitam questionamentos sobre o que poderá satisfazê-las sexualmente e, dessa forma, terem uma boa qualidade de vida. Objetivou-se apreender os significados representacionais de trabalhadoras sexuais acerca da satisfação sexual no seu cotidiano. Estudo qualitativo, fundamentado na Teoria das Representações Sociais, realizado no município sede da Região do Alto Sertão Produtivo da Bahia (Brasil), em áreas de vulnerabilidade social, onde são localizados os locais de prostituição. Participaram do estudo 132 mulheres. A Técnica de Associação Livre de Palavras foi usada para a coleta de dados, com o termo indutor “prazer/satisfação sexual”. O corpus foi organizado e processado por meio do software IRAMUTEQ que emitiu o Plano Fatorial de Correspondência, Árvore Máxima de Similitude e a Nuvem de Palavras. Os resultados oriundos das três formas de análise demonstraram homogeneidade nas representações sociais, pois o inconsciente do grupo apresentou o termo “dinheiro” como central e principal formador campo representacional acerca da “satisfação sexual”, fugindo à ideia de que as profissionais do sexo sentem orgasmo no ato sexual com os clientes. Assim, refletir sobre a “satisfação sexual’, ancorada na Teoria das Representações Sociais, possibilitará que profissionais de saúde repensem suas práticas, considerando as especificidades desse segmento populacional, no que se refere ao planejamento de cuidados à saúde sexual das mulheres que exercem o trabalho sexual, focado na libido e na parte subjetiva da sexualidade, extrapolando o senso comum de que o foco da assistência em saúde das prostitutas deve estar focado apenas na prevenção de infecções sexualmente transmissíveis.

This article sought to understand the structure of young lesbians' social representations of sexual health, based on their experiences and practices. This is a descriptive, qualitative study based on the Theory of Social Representations. The Free Word Association Test (FWAAT) was used online for 124 self-declared lesbians, aged 18 to 29 years, and of these, seven responded to a semi-structured interview script. The TALP data was processed using IRaMuTeQ software (prototypical analysis), contextualized by excerpts from the interviews that portray experiences and practices, and scientific references on the subject. The results pointed to the terms 'condom', "care" and 'prevention' as core elements in the structure of social representations. In the interviews, these terms refer to the importance attributed to protection and disease prevention, although the condom models are not adapted to the sexual practices of trafficked sex. The participants' practices and experiences also emphasize personal hygiene. The development of effective public policies for lesbian health requires valuing the knowledge they share socially.

This article sought to understand the structure of young lesbians’ social representations of sexual health, based on their experiences and practices. This is a descriptive, qualitative study based on the Theory of Social Representations. The Free Word Association Test (FWAAT) was used online for 124 self-declared lesbians, aged 18 to 29 years, and of these, seven responded to a semi-structured interview script. The TALP data was processed using IRaMuTeQ software (prototypical analysis), contextualized by excerpts from the interviews that portray experiences and practices, and scientific references on the subject. The results pointed to the terms ‘condom’, “care” and ‘prevention’ as core elements in the structure of social representations. In the interviews, these terms refer to the importance attributed to protection and disease prevention, although the condom models are not adapted to the sexual practices of trafficked sex. The participants’ practices and experiences also emphasize personal hygiene. The development of effective public policies for lesbian health requires valuing the knowledge they share socially.