Spirituality and religiosity for umbandist and candomblecist women: social representation and health implications

Abstract

The object of study refers to the representations of spirituality and religiosity for women who belong to Afro-diasporic religions, specifically those who are faithful to Umbanda and Candomblé. The objective was to analyze the representational structure of spirituality and reli-giosity for Umbandist and Candomblecist women with the aim of thinking of an explanatory model of this symbolic construction and implications for the practice of care in the area of health. Qualitative study, in the light of Social Representations in its structural approach. Data collected with 207 Umbandist and Candomblecist women through free evocations of the inducing terms “spiritua-lity” and “religiosity”, in addition to the charac-terization and scale of religiosity. The evocations were submitted to prototypical and similarity analyses with Iramuteq, while quantitative data to descriptive statistics. The results show that the central elements for religiosity are faith, belief, God and love, while for spirituality, they are faith, Orixás, God, peace and love. The tree of similarity explains the centrality of faith for the structuring of this representation. The representations are organized around the idea of a relationship between the human and the divine.