Social representations of nursing students about hospital assistance and primary health care

Objective: To analyze how social representations of hospital and community care are structured in two groups of nursing students – 1st and 4th years. Method: Qualitative research oriented by the Theory of Social Representations. We used a questionnaire with Free Association of Words. Data were analyzed in the Software IRaMuTeQ 0.6 alpha 3. Results: We applied the method of Descending Hierarchical Classifi cation and obtained four classes. Class 4 has the largest social representation (30.41%) within the corpus. The two organizational axes are nurse and disease/patient in the central core. On the periphery are the care and help related to the nurse and the treatment and prevention associated with the disease. Conclusion: Social representations focus on disease/patient and on the role of nurses in the treatment, prevention, and care. Health promotion and the social determinants of health are absent from the social representations of students.

Early Modern Trading Networks in Europe. Cooperation and the case of Simon Ruiz.

In the early modern period, trade became a truly global phenomenon. The logistics, financial and organizational complexity associated with it increased in order to connect distant geographies and merchants from different backgrounds. How did these merchants prevent their partners from dishonesty in a time where formal institutions and legislation did not traverse these different worlds? This book studies the mechanisms and criteria of cooperation in early modern trading networks. It uses an interdisciplinary approach, through the case study of a Castilian long-distance merchant of the sixteenth century, Simon Ruiz, who traded within the limits of the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires. Early Modern Trading Networks in Europe discusses the importance of reciprocity mechanisms, trust and reputation in the context of early modern business relations, using network analysis methodology, combining quantitative data with qualitative information. It considers how cooperation and prevention could simultaneously create a business relationship, and describes the mechanisms of control, policing and punishment used to avoid opportunism and deception among a group of business partners. Using bills of exchange and correspondence from Simon Ruiz’s private archive, it charts the evolution of this business network through time, debating which criteria should be included or excluded from business networks, as well as the emergence of standards. This book intends to put forward a new approach to early modern trade which focuses on individuals interacting in self-organized structures, rather than on states or empires. It shows how indirect reciprocity was much more frequent than direct reciprocity among early modern merchants and how informal norms, like ostracism or signaling, helped to prevent defection and deception in an effective way.