Social Representations of Medically Assisted Fecundation a Study on the Discursive Construction of “Media Texts”

Amelia Manuti, Giuseppe Mininni

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DOI: 10.4236/psych.2010.15043                

Abstract

The present contribution moves from the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1961) and focuses attention on the importance of social communication within negotiation processes of shared meanings. Actually, discursive psychology (Potter, & Wetherell, 1987; Billig, 1991) has showed that social representation have a narrative nature since they organize the cognitive schemata that people use to give sense to the world (Lazlo, 1997). In such a frame a crucial role is played by mass media, which do contribute to construct and convey the figurative nucleus of each representation (Mininni, 2004). By adopting this discursive perspective, the present contribution aims at investigating the social debate about assisted fecundation which in Italy has accompanied the campaign for the abrogation of Law 40. The corpus of data is made up of a sample of 46 media-texts collected within the weeks before the referendum. The data have been investigated by adopting diatextual analysis (Mininni, 1992; 2003; 2005).

Keywords

Media Discourse, Ethical Dilemmas, Discourse Analysis

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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