DRAFT: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCOSOCIAL RESEARCH AUTHOR: JOSEPHINE BARNETT EMAIL: JBARNETT@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU 1 The Importance of Visuality In Psychosocial Research BACKGROUND Visual culture is not isolated from the social world is constructed from the social reality of vision and attention. Therefore the integral question that arises when incorporating the image into psychosocial research is the role of images and consumers / produces of images on the psyche which intersects in complex ways with regard to the micro (social interaction, relationships) and macro (how visual culture shapes or fosters certain cultural, social norms and behavior particular to a historical, social and political context) . The value of images from society for social science research remains to an important degree dependent on the correct interpretation of the codes transferred or constructed consciously or unconsciously by the maker, both at the level of the referent (gestures, mimicry, clothing, spatial setup) and at the level of the image creation process (style, image connotations, conventions). Decoding, therefore, is not a simple task, especially when it concerns visual products which were produced a long time ago, or which originated within a (sub)culture. Gombrich (1944) concluded that the claim that something was made ‘from life' clearly must have had a different meaning at that time: "He can have meant only that he had drawn his schema in the presence of a real lion" (Gombrich, 1994, p. 68). Over the last decade, as public sociology and community-based participatory research methods become more ubiquitous, the diversity in types of visual research methods employed have multiplied (Grady, 1996; Pauwels, 2015). Visual sociology surprisingly is perceived as a new sub-field among the social scientists despite that historical photography and sociology emerged during the late 1800s (Becker, 1974). With the increase in the visual methodological