Social Representations of the gypsy woman among non-gypsy Brazilian and Italian population: Psychological and social anchoring

Abstract

Based on the non-consensual approach of the Theory of Social Representations, the present study aimed to investigate the processes of social and psychological anchoring regarding the social representations of the gypsy woman, dimension which allows analyzing the modulation of the social objects from the interindividual positioning and the experiences shared by subjects of the representation according to their sociocultural context of insertion. The study included 643 non-gypsy, Brazilian and Italian individuals with mean age of 22.81 years (SD=5.73). Once lexical correspondence analysis was conducted, the process of psychological anchoring indicated the formation of eight clusters, which characterize different representations, according to the following dimensions: magical-religious, maternity and care of the family-group, social exclusion, and female figures. Through the analysis of the social anchoring process, we verified that variables such as contact, gender, and nationality act in the modulation of these different representations over the object, producing ambiguities that have historically led to processes of discrimination against gypsy groups.