Sabine Caillaud

• PhD
• Professor (Asssociate) at Lumière University Lyon 2

While sustainable urban planning seeks to bring nature back to cities by developing urban parks, environmental education programmes (EEP) use these parks to bring children back to nature. This research investigated 7-year-old children’s representations of a renovated urban park in Lyon (France). It focused on children’s social representations of th...

Malnutrition gives rise to stigmatisation worldwide and is a pressing societal issue. Drawing on social representation theory and on the process of othering, a lexicometric analysis of Nepalese press articles (N = 440) was conducted to explore if, and how, Othering of the malnourished is at play and how articles (re)construct the threat of malnutri...

Caillaud, S., Kalampalikis, N. & Doumergue, M. (2022). Designing focus groups. In U. Flick (Ed.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Design (pp. 684-699). London: Sage. A focus group can be defined as a method to collect data through group interactions concerning a topic determined by the research aim (Morgan, 1996). Initially developed in...

Development programmes tackling severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in children tend to try to replace traditional beliefs with biomedical knowledge. However, stigmatization associated with undernutrition may be an additional impediment to seeking assistance. Drawing on the concepts of cognitive polyphasia and of othering, this study explored how diffe...

This article investigates the understanding by different groups of what psychology is and what psychologists do. We first recall some of the tensions that fuelled the discipline and underpinned its institutionalization in France. Then, drawing on social representations (SR) theory and on the wind-rose model, we explore how SR of psychology and of t...

This paper explores how a new French law incorporating a new conceptualization of disability formulated at the international level by the WHO is appropriated at the local level by multidisciplinary teams of professionals in charge of the assessment of disability. Drawing on social representations theory, its concept of cognitive polyphasia and its...

Climate change is one of the main risks humanity faces this century. Numerous studies in social sciences show that people have a biased understanding of scientific knowledge regarding climate change and, consequently, do not adopt the good practices. We consider the concept of threat helpful to understand why this is so. Indeed, it integrates cogni...

INTRODUCTION: In the frame of the Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition, a gap in coverage and a lack of adherence to treatment persist reducing its potential benefits. Indeed, traditional beliefs about undernutrition may inhibit relevant health behaviours (Burtscher & Burza, 2015), inviting therefore to explore social representations of...

This paper examines some of the main processes in the evolution of triangulation in qualitative research (QR) and social representations theory (SRT) in social psychology in recent decades. By adopting a cross-historical approach, we seek to outline how SRT can strengthen its epistemological approach by embracing triangulation, and to highlight tha...

Collective emotions are considered relevant factors in predicting pro-ecological behavior. However, the literature provides no insight into the role played by culture, despite the fact that emotions depend on specific appraisals, which are culturally grounded. As climate change is appraised as a political issue in France and as a moral issue in Ger...

In some cases, focus groups are used as a stand-alone method, but they are also frequently combined with other approaches. When designing a study, a combination of focus groups and individual interviews may be selected because they afford access to different aspects of the phenomenon under study (with focus groups being included in order to provide...

Menaces sociales et environnementales : Repenser la société des risques ---- Sabine Caillaud, Virginie Bonnot et Ewa Drozda-Senkowska (dir.) ---- Le monde est plein de dangers : crise économique, chômage, incivilités, délinquance, crimes, guerre et conflits, problèmes de santé publique, sécurité nucléaire, changements climatiques, extinction d’espè...

Le champ du handicap a connu un bouleversement important avec la loi de 2005 invitant à se dégager d’une approche biomédicale du handicap pour tendre vers une approche globale de la personne. Cet article interroge dans ce contexte, d’une part les attentes et représentations vis-à-vis du psychologue chez les membres des équipes pluridisciplinaires (...

La théorie des représentations sociales se caractérise par la diversité de ses approches, des niveaux d'analyse et par conséquent des outils méthodologiques à la disposition du chercheur (Bauer & Gaskell, 1999). Nombreuses sont les recherches utilisant la théorie des représentations sociales qui recourent ainsi à différentes méthodes de manière sim...

This article seeks to illustrate why and how social representations theory (SRT) based in its dialogical epistemology can be used as a critical approach to analyse the ecological crisis. We first present the shortcomings of some models used in social psychology – that they are rather individual and cognitivist, discrediting common sense knowledge,...

This study explores the way groups cope with collective responsibility for ecological problems. The social representations approach was adopted, and the collective symbolic coping model was used as a frame of analysis, integrating collective emotions to enhance the understanding of coping processes. The original feature of this study is that the an...

One Research Program – Multiple Methods From the earliest stages of the theory, social representations have been studied using different methodological approaches. Instead of linking concept and method in a monogamous way, a research program was pursued by using a variety of rather different methods. Qualitative Methods and Social Representations...

The issue of methods in social representations theory has proved contentious for some time, although we would argue that the focus of this discussion has shifted in recent years. During the 1980s and 1990s much criticism centred on the supposed lack of focus on methods in early considerations of social representations, and an alleged methodological...

The aim of this article is to show that focus groups (FGs) are a relevant method for the study of social representations of ecological practices and the meanings they have acquired in different socio-cultural contexts. First, relevant theoretical elements about ecological practices and representations are mentioned. Then, our different steps of des...

This paper aims to elucidate how global ecological problems (such as climate change) affect everyday knowledge and practices in different sociocultural contexts. A qualitative research design based on interviews and focus groups was applied in France and in Germany. Results show that 1) causes and consequences of climate change remain unfamiliar in...

Climate change is a major current affair for which recent United Nations climate conferences aim to build consensus and develop international solutions. The objective of this article is to compare, through the theoretical lens of social representations, the way in which French and German media, specifically newspapers, represent the Bali climate co...

The aim of this article is to propose some new research’s lines to understand the senses accorded to ecological practices by paying attention to social representations of pollution. First we present some studies about the link between attitudes and behavior toward ecology and some of their limits. Then, we propose to use another approach : the soci...

Caillaud, S., Kalampalikis, N., & Flick, U. (2010). Penser la crise écologique : représentations et pratiques franco-allemandes. Cahiers Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale, 87(3), 621-644. This article examines how the ecological crisis makes sense in French and Germany. First, social representations’ approach and the idea of “a human history o...

Cet article interroge l’analyse des narrations subjectives comme outil méthodologique pour étudier les représentations sociales. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons l’approche des représentations sociales et le savoir narratif comme une forme de savoir quotidien. Les narrations sont alors envisagées comme lieu possible d’étude des représentation...