Symbolic Coping Research Articles

Collective symbolic coping with new technology: Knowledge, images and public discourse.

Using data from policy analyses, media analyses and a European-wide survey about public perceptions of biotechnology conducted in 1996 and again in 1999, it is shown how a country's public develops an everyday understanding of a new technology (genetic modification) construed as potentially harmful by the media. To understand the reliance on images and related beliefs, we propose a theory of collective symbolic coping. It identifies four steps: first, the creation of awareness; second, production of divergent images; third, convergence upon a couple of dominant images in the public sphere; fourth, normalization. It is suggested that symbolic coping occurs in countries where a recent increase in policy activity and of media reporting has alerted the public; that this public show a high proportion of beliefs in menacing images; that these beliefs are relatively independent of pre-existing popular science knowledge; and that they are functionally equivalent to scientific knowledge in providing judgmental confidence and reducing self-ascribed ignorance. These propositions are shown to be true in Austria and Greece. Several implications of the theory are discussed, including social representation theory and public understanding of science.

Representations of far-flung illnesses: the case of Ebola in Britain

In western cultures lay people are faced with a plethora of far-flung illnesses, relayed to them by the mass media. A number of social scientists have called for scrutiny of the link between people's patterns of thinking concerning such events, and the messages to which they are exposed. Using the outbreaks of Ebola in Africa in the mid-1990s as a vehicle, the study examines how British broadsheets and their readers, and British tabloids and their readers, make sense of this far-flung illness. Existing work on early representations of HIV/AIDS in the west is utilised to inform the research questions. In particular, this study investigates whether Ebola is constructed as a threat, how media and lay representations of Ebola interact, and whether there are different pockets of shared thinking, or a more uniform representation, in relation to Ebola in Britain. An analysis of the themes in 48 broadsheet and tabloid articles, and 50 interviews with their readers, reveals a common picture in which Ebola is represented as African, associated with African practices, and seen as posing little threat to Britain. However, group differences exist, and are characterised by a more essentialised vision of Ebola in the tabloids and their readers, in contrast to a focus on structural features linked to Ebola's escalation in the broadsheets and their readers. In terms of the media–mind relationship, beyond the similarities found between media type and their respective readers’ ideas, certain key differences exist: While the newspapers make Ebola ‘real’ by referring to its potential to globalise, as well as to how it can be contained, lay thinkers feel detached from it, and draw an analogy between Ebola and science fiction. This is discussed as a method of symbolic coping on the part of the readers, as well as in terms of the power exerted by media imagery on lay representations of Ebola.

Social Representations and beyond: Brute Facts, Symbolic Coping and Domesticated Worlds

Social representation theory is scrutinized for its capacity to ask new questions and to give new answers to social psychological problems. Its social constructionist implications and relationship to brute facts are investigated. It is shown that social representations result from collective symbolic coping with 'brute' facts. Consequently representations create the domesticated world of social objects which implies considering activity as part of a representation. Culture change in modern societies is shown to produce 'cognitive polyphasia' by adding alternative representations to existing ones instead of replacing them.

Relevance, discourse and the ‘hot’ stable core social representations—A structural analysis of word associations

This paper presents an investigation of the structure of word associations dependent on the context in which they are assessed. Respondents from Spain and Nicaragua produced free associations about war and peace. Word associations about each of the two stimulus words were produced either spontaneously or within the context of a distracting priming condition in contrast to the association task. The semantic space for each stimulus word (war, peace) is analysed to find substructures of words which remain stable across contexts. These substructures or stable cores are taken to indicate a well‐structured social representation as opposed to a loosely organized knowledge domain. Such cores were found for associations about war in both countries, but for peace in the Nicaraguan sample only. This finding is interpreted as a consequence of public discourse and symbolic coping with relevant or threatening objects or phenomena. Stable cores were found to consist primarily of ‘hot’ words, i.e. words which are proximal to an individual's experience. More intellectual and distant (‘cold’) words did not enter the stable core. Results are discussed in terms of the central core theory of social representations and of numerical consensus being an insufficient criterion for social representations.