Social representations in victims of violence due to armed conflict

Abstract

It is important for social psychology to investigate and describe the social representations constructed by people who have been victims of violence due to armed conflict in Colombia. From this context, in the present research article, it is proposed to identify the functions of these representations, as well as the way in which the subjects understand, explain and transform their knowledge, lived experiences and psychosocial realities. The results of a qualitative study with an ethnographic design of a descriptive type are presented, which was used as a sample to victims of violence by armed conflict registered at the point of attention to victims of the municipality of Palmira who agreed to participate voluntarily in this project. Tools such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic questionnaire were used. To determine the findings, we took into account categories of the functions of social representations and as subcategories: knowledge function, identity function, orientation function and substitution function, understanding the responses of the subjects interviewed, describing the social representations they perform, and identifying the processes experienced by the victims, as well as a global analysis of what was found in the instrument to associate said reality with the theory. It is concluded that social representations are a way in which these social subjects learn about the events of daily life, among these, their experiences, being victims of violence, the characteristics of the environment and identification as social groups They construct new meanings in the face of the phenomenon of violence experienced in the past and in which they rebuild their new quality of life.