The Folk Sociological Imagination

Manufacturing Agency Through Smoking Among Chinese Adolescents

Bibliographic Data

ID11165083
AuthorsBo Li (0000-0002-7801-0319, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume48
Issue3
Pagese70173-e70173
Publication date2026-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9566.70173
PMID41863090
OpenAlexW7139971889
LanguageEN
References cited39

Persistent adolescent smoking in China presents a paradox within the context of advancing nicotine control. Moving beyond social–environmental explanations, this study employs Mills' sociological imagination to conceptualise this persistence as an agentive response to constrained realities and futures, enacted through peer‐curated lay epidemiology. Its core argument is that adolescents cultivate a folk sociological imagination—a vernacular system of sense‐making—to manufacture agency and reframe smoking risk. Qualitative data from 21 adolescent smokers in Shenzhen, including 208 health diaries and 17 interviews, reveal how this is achieved through three practices: the selective valorisation of healthy smoker exemplars; folk attribution of causality to external or individual factors; and prevalence‐as‐safety normalisation. This folk process reconfigured the public issue of smoking risk into a series of manageable private troubles, transforming statistical harm into a matter of individual circumstance. Findings highlight three gaps in current efforts: an epistemic gap in policy, which dismisses peer‐validated evidence; an intervention gap in health education, which fails to engage with lay reasoning and a structural hope gap, which generates a form of cruel optimism that overlooks the need for alternative avenues for agency and belonging

Agency (philosophy) · Argument (complex analysis) · Attribution · Causality (physics) · Cognitive reframing · Context (archaeology) · Folk psychology · Harm · Salience (neuroscience) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Risk Perception and Management · Smoking Behavior and Cessation

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