64

The current study deals with the representation of hospital hygiene. The purpose is twofold: to understand how knowledge about hygiene is acquired by nursing staff during their training (effect of the level of knowledge), and to identify how this knowledge evolves while practising a job in direct connection with hygiene (effect of practice). Three groups of participants were questioned: nursing staff (nursing executives, nurses and nursing auxiliaries), students training in nursing care (first, second and third year students) and non-specialist students. The results show that the three groups clearly share a common cultural base. This result confirms the existence of an overall architecture which links collective representations and social representations. Furthermore, a detailed analysis reveals important differences between the social representations which the three groups have of hygiene: the professionals have a representation of practises anchored in precise scientific knowledge; the specialist students know certain things about hygiene, but this knowledge seems to remain abstract and normative; as for the non-specialist students, their representation of hygiene is linked to their practices, but these practices are limited to domestic hygiene. This set of results indicates the existence of a close relationship between the insertion of a given social group (distance from the object of representation) and the social representation they construct about the object, and this independently from the collective representation.