TY - JOUR AU - Pérez Castro, Judith AU - Piña Osorio, Juan Manuel PY - 2022/11/10 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Social representations of disability in high school students JF - Nova Scientia JA - NS VL - 14 IS - 29 SE - Human and Social Sciences DO - 10.21640/ns.v14i29.3100 UR - https://novascientia.lasallebajio.edu.mx/ojs/index.php/Nova/article/view/3100 SP - AB - <p>In this paper, we analyze the social representations about disability in a group of high school students, from two Mexican cities: Oaxaca and Estado de México.  The research was based on an associative method. For that purpose, we designed a questionnaire in which students were asked to write the three words that came into mind when they thought about «person with disability», and then to briefly explain the reason for each one. For the analysis of information, we used the natural semantic network technique. The complete network included 107 words, with a semantic weight of 587. Based on this diversity of expressions, we characterized four representations: Social, Medical-rehabilitative, Tragic-charity, and Optimistic. The first two representations had the highest semantic weight in the complete network, 223 and 184 respectively, meanwhile, the last two reached scores of 103 and 73 each. These outcomes may be seen as a contradiction; however, they show that social representations are not monolithic entities, on the contrary, they are the result of scientific knowledge and common sense; nor belong to a certain group, but they are the product of the information disseminated by the different socializing agents.</p> ER -