ABSTRACT
Using drawings to study children’s development has a long history in developmental psychology. At the beginning of the 20th century, William Stern was among the first researchers to collect children’s drawings systematically. He i.a. conducted comprehensive collections, e.g. on the topic “the Land of Plenty”. The methodological approach and framework for analysing the pictures remained vague and descriptive at that time and focused on inter-individual differences, e.g. in the development of drawing abilities. Meanwhile, pictures gain some interest in psychology, especially photographs, e.g. in the context of social media. However, research using children’s drawings is still scarce, which is probably due to the methodological challenges involved. In this chapter, we present a replication of Stern’s historic the Land of Plenty study and show a qualitative-reconstructive approach to serial picture analysis. With this method, even large collections of children’s drawings can be analysed in a way that allows access to the children’s perspectives and their inherent meaning-making processes. This provides qualitative developmental psychologists with a valuable means of exploring child development processes from the children’s point of view and including their everyday socio-cultural experiences.
