Social Representations of Female Sex Workers about Aids

The study aimed to identify the social representations of AIDS produced by female sex workers. This is a descriptive, exploratory study was conducted in five nightclubs in Teresina, with 30 female sex workers. Data were collected from October 2008 to January 2009, through the focus group technique, rendered in software Lexical Contextual Analysis of a Set of Segments Texts and analyzed by descending hierarchical classification based on the Theory of Social Representations. The results indicated four categories, namely: 1. Feelings related to AIDS; 2Positioning for women facing AIDS; A disease 3and 4protective of other AIDS-related. The results show that social representation of AIDS as a disease of the other, incurable and fatal. These representations indicate a profile of vulnerability to AIDS, from the remoteness of the disease and stereotypical information about the forms of contagion.