Difuzarea teoriei reprezentãrilor sociale prin intermediul contextului instituţional al comunicãrii ştiinţifice
Diffusion of social representations' theory through institutional context of scientific communication

Summary/Abstract: This article is based on research conducted in the framework of a meta-theoretical analysis of the complete body of Social Representations literature launched by Annamaria de Rosa in 1994 (see de Rosa, 1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2002). It focuses on literature produced for International Social Representations Conferences, considered the primary institutional context of this specialised scientific community to disseminate and develop the Social Representation Theory and related research fields. Some time has passed since the foundation of the theory (1961) and more and more researchers from different cultural settings are participating in the field. This work is meant to provide an organic, comprehensive understanding of the direction that research in Social Representations is taking and of the overall development of this theory over time and across continents. Abstracts of all conference literature currently available in both electronic and traditional printed format were used as analysis units. Content analysis was carried out on these materials using a reduced version of the “Grid for Meta-Analysis of SR literature” (de Rosa, 1994), available on the European PhD on Social Representations and Communication website: http://www.europhd.psi.uniroma1.it. After classification, the data was analysed using tools provided by HUDAP (WSSA1), SPAD.N (ACM), and SPSS statistical packages to develop a “facet analysis” and ACM, using the international conferences on SR and the theoretical vs. empirical nature of the presentations as illustrative variables. Finally, a data comparison was made between results obtained through the various strategies of data analysis described above. Here we intend to further develop the discussion of the results already presented in a previous contribution (de Rosa, D’Ambrosio, 2003) aimed to offer a total view of the relationship between the ACM and WSSA1 statistical analyses in terms of overlapping areas, differences and convergences. The novelty of this article, compared to previuos contributions, is the focus on the comparative cross-cultural perspective in the meta-theoretical analysis of the development of the SR theory.

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