Cognitive polyphasia in the social representations of alcoholism/Polifasia cognitiva nas representacoes sociais do alcoolismo

Different rationalities participate in the construction of social representations through the process of cognitive polyphasia. We considered the hypothesis that health professionals do not use only technical-scientific knowledge to construct their representations. This research aimed at understanding the social representations of alcoholism constructed by Brazilian Family Health professionals, especially the dimension of cognitive polyphasia. Forty health professionals equally sampled by gender and profession (physicians and non-physicians) participated in this research. They answered to semi-structured interviews. We analyzed the data with the Top-down Hierarchical Classification implemented in the software ALCESTE. Results show that professionals simultaneously represented alcoholism as: 1) a multifactorial disease to be treated with a comprehensive approach, its causes are known, the health team must apply multi-professional procedures. 2) A social problem related to the poverty of communities, to be treated with the (few) available resources and with willpower. Its causes are obscure, the alcoholic patient does not receive health care, there are contradictory motivations between patients and professionals and treatment depends on willpower and non-available resources. We discuss the possible influence of cultural beliefs that associate alcoholism to poverty. Professionals implicitly considered the reified universe and the consensual universe to construct their social representations, what characterizes the influence of cognitive polyphasia. We make methodological suggestions regarding the use of the software ALCESTE: a chart for the interpretation of Classes of simple statements generated by the software and the use of the concepts of reified universe and consensual universe for the interpretation of its graphics (dendrograms).Keywords: social representation; alcoholism; primary health care; cognitive polyphasia; ALCESTE.Diferentes racionalidades agem na construcao de representacoes sociais, por meio do processo de polifasia cognitiva. Parte-se da hipotese de que profissionais de saude nao se restringem ao saber tecnico-cientifico ao construir suas representacoes. Esta pesquisa teve o objetivo de compreender as representacoes sociais do alcoolismo construidas por profissionais de Saude da Familia, em especial a dimensao da polifasia cognitiva. Participaram 40 profissionais, recrutados igualmente quanto a genero e profissao (medicos e nao-medicos). Eles