Social representations on baby feeding among health workers in primary care

What is it about?

The aim of this study was to identify how health workers in primary care, namely, nursing technicians and community workers, develop the subject of children’s eating habits. The focus was on some aspects of complementary feeding, like the conceptions of use of sugar and salt in baby food, as well as the main ideas regarding foods that can prevent anemia, such as meat and leguminous plants. A social survey with qualitative and descriptive approach and analytical character was conducted. The identification and systematization of social representations (SR), described in the interviews, were operationalized through the Collective Subject Discourse (CSD). It was observed that the discursive practices pervade the technical-scientific norms, making use of some concepts that merge to lay knowledge through representational system, challenging insights on the construction of health condition for the infant.The SR contain some ideas related to the creation of a health condition for the child, reconciling the concept of health elaborated by biomedicine, but also converging cultural senses of body and food.

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