Sociodrama as a qualitative research strategy with Community Health Workers

Abstract

Community Health Workers (CHW) are strategic actors for mental health care in Primary Health Care (PHC), as their proximity to the community enhances the conditions of care related to psychosocial rehabilitation. This is an exploratory study of a qualitative and participatory nature, which sought to
identify the impasses and challenges faced by the CHW in mental health work, using sociodrama adapted to the qualitative methodology, in which the techniques were participant observation and focus groups. The study corresponds to an implementation survey, occurred in 2019, which sought to qualify the mental health care of a health network in a medium-sized municipality in São Paulo. Sixty-eight CHW from the same municipality participated, through 5 sociodramatic sessions, and the results were analyzed based on thematic categorical content analysis. In short, the work pointed out that although the CHW present great contributions to mental health care in the territory, there are still important challenges for the consolidation of its practice; sociodrama was a powerful strategy to address these challenges, being a valuable tool to capture phenomena involving subjectivity and social relationships, inherent in qualitative health research.