Autoeficácia, características sociodemográficas e capacitação profissional: um estudo com servidores de uma Universidade Federal

Self-efficacy, the construct developed by Albert Bandura in 1977 and widely studied around the world, means the individual's belief in his own capacity to successfully perform a certain activity. This study aims to determine the degree of association between sociodemographic characteristics and professional training to the levels of Self-Efficacy at Work (SEW) of the Administrative Assistants in a federal university. This is a descriptive research submitted to and approved by the Ethics Committee of UFRN. The method of data analysis, in quantitative nature, was accomplished with the aid of the statistical programs R and Minitab. The instrument used in research was a sociodemographic data questionnaire, variables of professional training and the General Perception of Self-efficacy Scale (GPSES), applied to the sample by 289 Assistants in Administration. Statistical techniques for data analysis were descriptive statistics, cluster analysis, reliability test (Cronbach's alpha), and test of significance (Pearson). Results show a sociodemographic profile of Assistants in Administration of UFRN with well-distributed characteristics, with 48.4% men and 51.6% female; 59.9% of them were aged over 40 years, married (49.3%), color or race white (58%) and Catholics (67.8%); families are composed of up to four people (75.8%) with children (59.4%) of all age groups; the occupation of the mothers of these professionals is mostly housewives (51.6%) with high school education up to parents (72%) and mothers (75.8%). Assistants in Administration have high levels of professional training, most of them composed two groups of servers: the former, recently hired public servants (30.7%) and another with long service (59%), the majority enter young in career and it stays until retirement, 72.4% of these professionals have training above the minimum requirement for the job. The analysis of SEW levels shows medium to high levels for 72% of assistants in administration; low SEWclassified people have shown a high average of 2.7, considered close to the overall mean presented in other studies, which is 2.9. The cluster analysis has allowed us to say that the characteristics of the three groups (Low, Medium and High SEW) are similar and can be found in the three levels of SEW representatives with all the characteristics investigated. The results indicate no association between the sociodemographic variables and professional training to the levels of self-efficacy at work of Assistants in Administration of UFRN, except for the variable color or race. However, due to the small number of people who declared themselves in color or black race (4% of the sample), this result can be interpreted as mere coincidence or the black people addressed in this study have provided a sense of efficacy higher than white and brown ones. The study has corroborated other studies and highlighted the subjectivity of the self-efficacy construct. They are needed more researches, especially with public servants for the continuity and expansion of studies on the subject, making it possible to compare and confirm the results

Tramas do impedimento: os sentidos da desistência entre Alfabetizandos da EJA

For young people and adults that have not yet conquered reading and writing, being literate is the most important thing in life , a dream . Scholarly learning for them is like hegemonic knowledge in contemporary literate society. Thus, for them to get into school is to be able to have such knowledge and, through it, feel inserted into this society. However, along this process of learning, they start to drop out, little by little, statistically increasing the number of people who give up on young people and adult education Eja, as well as slowly reducing the contingent of illiteracy in the country. With this reality as a starting point, we question the concrete and symbolic reasons or motives that lead to a dropping out of the literacy classes at Eja. To do so, we have established, as the object of our study, the feelings of giving up among those involved in young people and adult literacy training. To understand such feelings is our purpose in this investigation. The theory of Social Representations (MOSCOVICI, 1978, 2004) was the theoretical-methodological option for subsidizing data search, analyses and interpretation, making us perceive the significance of the object of this study for these individuals. The gathering of such symbolic content involved the use of semi-structured interviews with eleven drop-outs and ten students who had repeated this modality of teaching in public schools in Natal, RN, during the 2006 school year. From the thematic and categorical analyses (BARDIN, 1977), we identified elements that gave support to some themes. Later, these themes led to three categories, suggesting that feelings associated with dropping out were based on the following: learning difficulties because they did not understand the contents; having their lack of knowledge exposed, thus bringing forth feelings of shame, humiliation, and embarrassment for not knowing how to read and write at a mature age; work, tiredness and sickness. The students who manage to remain in school are those who force themselves to live with the feelings of maladaptation and those who develop a sense of adaptation the other way round to the institution, that is, acceptance of institutional failures and omissions

Adolescentes preocupadas em conquistar um corpo magro: Um estudo sobre discursos produzidos em diários eletrônicos

The concern about a good physical condition is heavily present nowadays, in documentary films about health and in the media, and it is also expressed through the outstanding growth of physical academies, beauty institutes and aesthetic medicine and all kind of aesthetic surgeries. In the western world the body wave is a significant trend, characterized by the great investments in body image. However, what is overlooked is the fact that in parallel trend grows the number of teenagers, especially females, with all kind of problems related to their body image. As adolescence is a moment of transformations, teenagers tend to be more aware of their body image and often neglect food ingestion and try to build their bodies following the images they have from top models and movie stars. The low self-esteem accompanying this sort of experience is an additional problem. Therefore the research aim to analyze discourses regarding the body image produced in world wide web diaries (blogs). The blogs selection was made through the site www.blogs.com.br, which is considered the widest guide of electronic diaries in Brazil. We looked after blogs including the keyword body and from adolescents aged 10 to 19, who showed concern about a slim body. Three blogs were chosen, considering the example criteria. Discourse analysis shows that these teenagers feel unsatisfied with their bodies, searching by all means the thinness presented as a aesthetic paradigm in western societies which often implies neglecting their own health, using appetite inhibitor drugs, restricting or totally abstaining food ingestion for long periods of time, or provoking themselves vomits after ingesting food. These behaviors, together with intense fear of gaining weight, can be characterized as alimentary disorders, related to the body image. As they usually hide this sort of behaviors from family and friends who do not share this concern, the blogs seem to be an easy tool for adolescents to find peers with whom to share common values and ideas and reaffirm their identities and virtual sense of community