Social representations and themata: The construction and functioning of social knowledge about donation and transplantation
Authors: Moloney, Gail1; Hall, Rob2; Walker, Iain3
Source: British Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 44, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 415-441(27)
Publisher: British Psychological Society
Abstract:
This study extends previous research investigating the social representation of organ donation and transplantation (Moloney & Walker, 2000, ) by exploring the accommodation of contradiction (Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Thelmel, 2000) within consensual reality (Rose et al., 1995), and the role of themata (Markova, 2000) in a representation. The study employed a mail-out questionnaire embedded with eight experimental conditions, which manipulated two tasks, scenario rating scale and word association. WMDS (INDSCAL) analyses demonstrated that the dialectical concepts of life and death are generative of a contradictory representational field that is maintained through the differential elicitation of the normative and functional dimensions (Guimelli, 1998) of the representation in accordance with social context.Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1348/014466605X42246
Affiliations: 1: Southern Cross University, NSW, Australia, Murdoch University, WA, Australia 2: Environmetrics Pty, NSW, Australia 3: Murdoch University, WA, Australia

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