Ambientes restauradores para adolescentes: uma investigação com estudantes de uma cidade de médio porte do nordeste brasileiro

Abstract

The quality of life of the contemporary population has been affected by stress, notably in urban environments, interfering with their health (physical and mental) and productivity, especially among the most vulnerable people. To address this, the literature highlights the importance of investigating people's relationships with the places they find themselves in, in order to identify environments with restorative potential. Given this, this thesis asks: in the perception of adolescents from a mid-size city in the interior of the Northeast, what environments contribute to their psychophysiological restoration? The hypothesis defended indicates that adolescents prefer places that allow contact with nature and with people of the same age group, and enable the development of activities (contemplation, socialization, sports and leisure). The study took place at the Federal Institute of Education of Floriano, Piauí, and aimed to analyze the relationships of adolescents with environments that they consider restorative. The investigation assumed a qualitative-quantitative bias and a multi-method strategy, through two studies: (i) the first, aimed at people, applied the Perceived Stress Scale and questionnaire to 82 students in the 3rd year of technical high school and interviewed 8 of these participants; (ii) the second, focused on the environment, carried out field visits, naturalistic observations and photographic records to analyze environments that they indicated as restorative. In general, despite the level of perceived stress being below the average of the scale used, participants consider themselves stressed, especially women, and this stress was related to school and family routine. To restore stress, the following were mentioned: (a) environments within the school, in the city and at home and, (b) activities such as sleeping, reading and practicing physical activities. Some of the results obtained point to characteristics that may be related to cities in the interior of the Brazilian Northeast, such as playing sports, sleeping and reading, indicating an interrelationship between environment and activity that was called as Restorative Situation.