The study investigates health care workers' representations of AIDS and its sufferers as a part of a larger research program aimed at providing a better understanding of the factors that affect health care workers' helping behaviour. 345 Italian health care workers from public hospitals were requested to write «the first things that came to their minds when thinking of AIDS and of AIDS sufferers». From Multiple Correspondence Analysis three principal axes emerged: the first one expresses a distinction between a view focused on ways of transmission and a view focused on the affective impact; the second one expresses a distinction between a view of AIDS as a serious danger and a view that stresses the media construction of the problem; the third one expresses a distinction between a purely medical view and an emphatic-emotional view.
Contrary to previous results from research on the general public, in this case higher levels of scientific knowledge are not associated with less negative reactions toward AIDS sufferers.
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