Characteristics and social representation of ecstasy in Europe - Irefrea

with others, facilitates being able to keep going all night or understand the musicbetter).The second block shows us another chain of representation where the central themeis the positioning of individuals on the dangers of use. Here, we find associatedcomponents such as ecstasy provokes death or produces addiction or has a long termdepressive effect. These components also may be considered in some sense “effects” ofecstasy but which we believe it is the accent on danger that leads them to be associated.In other words, aspects which would make ecstasy a supposedly dangerous drug forthose who consume it.It is true that a mini-block also appears in some countries comprising two or threeitems. On interpreting these associations of these few items, we see that they can alwaysbe attributed to one or the other block so that it does not change the idea of these bigassociative blocks.What is rather interesting is that this distribution of items in two blocks or chains ofrepresentation is repeated both at a group level in consumers (C) and in non-consumers(NC), which leads us to believe that we are seeing two powerful stereotypes or clichéswith important repercussions on the behaviour of individuals and which must be takeninto account in designing preventive campaigns. It is important to understand thatalthough the positions of C and NC are opposed in each of the chains of representation,each of the chains is always respected.In short, the individuals in our survey think, understand or interact with ecstasythrough or on the basis of two associative chains or social representations -the implied“effects” (so that people use ecstasy) and its implied danger, to position themselves foror against, depending on whether or not they are consumers of ecstasy. It is worthasking if there are other chains of representation for ecstasy which are different fromthose found in this survey but they have not appeared anywhere during this research.The young would think about ecstasy through their response to two types of question,“what is it that you expect from ecstasy?” and “how would you evaluate the danger ofecstasy?” Depending on how individuals and groups stand on these questions willpossibly determine their behaviour in respect of the use of ecstasy.Analysis of the overall sample and of each country which is given below will takeinto account this interpretative methodology which we have just explained. We willindicate in each case if the diagram moves away from this general guide in both theconsumers sample (C) and the non-consumers (NC). We suggest that the socialrepresentations of our overall sample in Modena, in Nice and in Palma de Mallorcaclearly follow this same distribution in two blocks, with no interconnection, onereferring to the “position respect to the implied effects” and the other to the“problematic view of ecstasy” without there being any interchange of items from oneblock to another.In the case of Coimbra, the NC group follows the general rule whereas the diagramon the C group in Coimbra at a 5% significance level forms itself into a single block.108