RESTORATIVE ENVIRONMENT IN JUIZ DE FORA, MINAS GERAIS (MG): FROM TEXTUAL ANALYSIS TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PROPOSITIONAL AGENDA ABOUT THE UFJF BOTANICAL GARDEN

Abstract

This research had as its object of study the Botanical Garden of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF). From the concepts of environmental psychology implying the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), the study aimed to analyze the perception of visitors who made public comments available on the digital platform Google Reviews, being filtered based on Bardin's (2011) content analysis (CA) technique. Thus, the exploratory and descriptive research used the support of the Voyant Tools (2025) online tool for data processing aiming at a textual analysis from the Cirrus word cloud and the analysis called Link. The results based on a textual corpus formed by (n=813) comments revealed that the UFJF Botanical Garden is widely perceived as a space that promotes contact with nature, complying with criteria associated with the theory in question about restorative environments. Finally, a purposeful agenda, which offers subsidies both for planners and managers, as well as for researchers and other interested parties, was created with four main focuses: (1) Recovering attention; (2) Relieve stress; (3) Contribute to the quality of life; (4) Combat seasonality from the uses of the UFJF Botanical Garden. Future studies can expand the methodological design to include primary data measured by questionnaires and interviews, which can contribute to analyzing an important aspect of ART: the role of individual stories for the symbolic interaction that restorative environments can elicit.