This volume presents the key arguments that concern the relationships between the theory and methods in the fierce debate about the study of social representations, and considers the circumstances in which one can be certain of having described a social representation.

1. Empirical contributions to the study of social representations ; 2. Studying the thinking society: social representations, rhetoric, and attitudes ; 3. Studying social representations in children: just old wine in new bottles? ; 4. An ethnographic approach to social representations ; 5. Vikings! Children's social representations of history ; 6. Discourse analysis and social representations ; 7. Debating social representations ; 8. The problems of investigating social representations : linguistic parallels ; 9. Integrating paradigms, methodological implications ; 10. The descriptive analyses of shared representations ; 11. The lattice of polemic social representations: a comparison of the social representations of occupations in favelas, public housing, and middle-class neighbourhoods of Brazil ; 12. Finding social representations in attribute checklists: how will we know when we have found one? ; 13. Multidimensional scaling as a technique for the exploration and description of a social representation ; 14. The meaning of work for young people: the role of parents in the transmission of a social representation ; 15. Social representations of mental illness: naive and professional perspectives ; Epilogue: Methodological contributions to the theory of social representations ; Index