The relationship between social context and health represents an important research issue, which is at the centre of current developments of social psychology of the health. The social representational approach offers a frame to analyze common sense thinking about illness. This approach breaks with the cognitive and individualistic tradition that dominated the social psychological analysis of health risks. Concerning theory and methodology this approach enables a contextualized study of the socio-cognitive processes that intervene in the construction of risks through the operationalisation of the double nature -product/process- of the representation. Thus, triangulation as an inductive strategy of research constitutes a privileged approach. We present an application of this strategy through a research program concerning the representations of sexual relationships and AIDS-related risks of young adults in France and Greece. The pertinence of triangulation for the analysis of risk's construction within approaches that seek a multilevel explanation is discussed.
social representations; triangulation; sanitary risks
