A cidade vista pelos habitantes do campo de Araponga/MG: uma análise das representações sociais por meio do software Alceste

The relationship between the countryside and the city has been changing markedly, especially since the last two decades of the 20th century. The present article aimed to analyze how the rural population of a small coffee - growing municipality located in the Zona da Mata, Minas Gerais, manifested through its representations of “countryside” and “city” the approximations and differences about the way of life in both spaces. This study had a cross-sectional character and was carried out through the application of a semi-structured questionnaire, with a representative sample of the population, composed by 94 rural households. In the application of the questionnaire, it was used the technique of mixing questions that stimulated quick and spontaneous responses, with others of a more reflective nature. Based on the answers obtained, the corpus was prepared for the quantitative analysis of textual data, in Alceste software. The results concerning the spontaneous and reflexive representations that the rural ones expressed about the “city” and the “countryside” revealed a social vision of the world marked by the perspective of belonging to the city dynamics, combined with the rurality marks constituting his identity.