Information on latent tuberculosis infection in higher education: social representations of nursing students

Abstract

Objective: To analyze the social representations of nursing students regarding the sharing of information about latent tuberculosis infection in higher education. Method: Descriptive, qualitative study, anchored in the procedural aspect of the Theory of Social Representations. It was carried out with 37 students who reacted to the tuberculin test, enrolled from the 1st to the 5th grade, in the Undergraduate Nursing Course at a public university in Belém, Pará, Brazil. Between March and July 2023, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted, the corpus of which was 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: A total of 1,939 text segments were identified, of which 1,686 (86.95%) were used, generating seven lexical classes. It was decided to detail class 7, which outlined two representational sets, addressing how information was shared and suggestions on the topic. Conclusion: The limitations that weakened the timely sharing and quality of information motivated students to make suggestions to solve the challenges inherent to this context or mitigate its harmful effects.