From cosmological breakthrough to normalised disease

A longitudinal study on the social representations of Covid-19

Abstract

Studies on the social representations of Covid-19 can make important scholarly and practical contributions such as favouring the understanding of social thought about the emergence of a pandemic and its impacts on different groups and providing insight for the planning of communication about health and health education. Longitudinal studies on the social representations of infectious diseases are scarce. The present study is a longitudinal investigation of the social representations of Covid-19 constructed by middle-class Brazilian adults. We conducted semi-structured interviews with seven participants at three different moments during the pandemic, April-May 2020, September 2020, and May-June 2021, totalising 21 interviews. We analysed the textual data with the Top-Down Hierarchical Classification provided by the software Iramuteq. The results show that participants initially represented Covid-19 as a radical transformation of the world based on spiritual, divine, or teleological explanations. With time, these beliefs became less prominent and the participants represented Covid-19 as a normalised disease with specific symptoms. Science-based beliefs became more prominent with time. We discuss this transformation in the social representations of Covid-19 based on the articulation between social representations and social practices. We also discuss the othering process as a constant feature of the investigated representations and ideological implications of this process.