ABSTRACT
Children’s drawings have been studied by psychologists for more than a century and Luquet’s work in the 1920s is still in use as a reference. Sociologists have only become interested in this field of research since the 1960s (Dennis, 1966). Even if today it is acceptable to see drawings as representations which convey the socio-cultural origins of the child, questions about the kind of sociological information we can expect to obtain from children’s drawings have yet to find clear and definite answers. There is a further practical problem which we can add to these epistemological and conceptual questions: the analysis of images, compared to textual analysis, is more problematic and difficult to operationalize. Here we face the same problem semiology has tried to solve: how should we proceed to ‘read’ images properly?
