Drugs

a semantic analysis of Brazilian studies

Abstract

Objective: is to perform a semantic analysis of the discursive elements present in national publications on illicit drugs. Method: a total of 336 excerpt extracts from 58 articles published in Brazilian journals between 2004 and 2014 were used. The articles were submitted to the Iramuteq® program and the frequency and class of words were obtained, which revealed the main discursive elements on the theme ‘drugs’. Results: the data were structured into five classes divided into two groups, which reveal the frequency of the corpus of analyzed words: Data and User, so that the “Data” group was composed of classes a) Epidemiology (17.5%) and b) Method (31.4%). The “User” group was composed by classes c) Health care (19.1%); d) Consequences of abuse (16.1%) and e) Social aspects (15.9%). Conclusion: the results indicated that the present discourses, in authors perspectives, point to the preference for investigative research, using the quantitative method, and the research related the thematic of drugs to socio-political aspects and the need for new plans of health care services.