Adolescents, Aids and televesion campaigns

Abstract

Searching for possibilities of new preventive strategic actions to control AIDS among adolescents, this study aims at understanding social representations of an adolescent's group on preventive AIDS campaigns on television and how these campaigns may influence their lives, as well as discussing the best way to work HIV prevention according to the subjects' viewpoint. The methodological strategy is constructivist, making use of Participative Research (Le Boterf) for fieldwork, and also some notions of the theory of Social Representations for the analysis of information. The results demonstrated that television has a meaningful influence power on those individuals in these campaigns, in spite of its limited effect given the sparse possibilities. This study found that the issues considered important by the intended audience were left out, and the isolated way these campaigns were developed - these were the main limitations for the necessary changes of behavior in adolescents facing AIDS.