Old age for adolescents: a social representations approach

Qualitative research, based on the Theory of Social Representations, which aimed to apprehend the social representations of teenagers in a public school and a private on ageing, and to compare them between these two groups. Participants were 60 adolescents, 30 from the private school and 30 from the public school, who responded to semi-structured interviews in the period May-June 2012. The collected data were subjected to content analysis techniques, from which emerged three categories, namely: representations of ageing, the treatment of the elderly, and the recognition of oneself as a subject in the aging process. The adolescents' social representations have showed negative and positive aspects in relation to old age, marked by the influence of socio-cultural aspects.