title: Social representations and themata: the construction and functioning of social knowledge about donation and transplantation.
abstract: This study extends previous research investigating the social representation of organ donation and transplantation (Moloney & Walker, 2000, 2002) by exploring the accommodation of contradiction (Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Thelmel, 2000) within consensual reality (Rose et al., 1995), and the role of themata (Markova, 2000) in a representation. The study employed a mail-out questionnaire embedded with eight experimental conditions, which manipulated two tasks, scenario rating scale and word association. WMDS (INDSCAL) analyses demonstrated that the dialectical concepts of life and death are generative of a contradictory representational field that is maintained through the differential elicitation of the normative and functional dimensions (Guimelli, 1998) of the representation in accordance with social context.
authors.affiliation: Southern Cross University, NSW, Australia. gmoloney@scu.edu.au
authors.forename: Gail
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Moloney
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.forename: Iain
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016377:Organ Transplantation; D012931:Social Environment; D012938:Social Perception; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D009927:Tissue and Organ Procurement; D014936:Word Association Tests