Being a reactor to the tuberculin test: social representations of nursing students

Abstract Objective To analyze the social representations of nursing students about their condition as reactors to the tuberculin test. Methods This is a qualitative, descriptive study, based on the procedural aspect of the Theory of Social Representations. It was carried out in the undergraduate nursing course of a public university in Belém, Pará, Brazil, with 37 students who reacted to the tuberculin test, attending from the first to the fifth grade. Individual interviews were conducted between March and July 2023, using a semi-structured script, with questions to understand the profile of participants and explore the object of study. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed to constitute a corpus and subjected to lexical analysis with the software Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires 0.7, alpha 2, using Descending Hierarchical Classification. Results Of the 37 participants, 24 (64.9%) were women and 28 (75.7%) were between 19 and 23 years old. The software identified 1,939 text segments, of which 1,686 (87.0%) were used, generating seven lexical classes. It was decided to detail classes 1 and 3, which indicated knowledge about the phenomenon and the affects attributed to the reactor condition, revealing differences between latent tuberculosis infection and the active form, and fear as the main affect. Conclusion Fear strongly underpinned students’ social representations of being reactors, considering that this condition marks the possibility of becoming ill with tuberculosis. In higher education, teaching-learning processes should provide spaces for discussion, aiming to broaden students’ understanding and deconstruct representations based on fear and anachronistic thoughts.