# The Folk Sociological Imagination: Manufacturing Agency Through Smoking Among Chinese Adolescents

## TL;DR

Chinese adolescents use a folk understanding of smoking to feel in control, despite public health warnings.

## Contribution

The study introduces the concept of a 'folk sociological imagination' as a novel framework for understanding adolescent smoking behavior.

## Key findings

- Adolescents use peer-curated lay epidemiology to manage smoking risk as personal troubles rather than public health issues.
- Smoking is reframed through practices like valorizing healthy smokers and normalizing prevalence as safety.
- Current policies and health education fail to address lay reasoning and structural limitations faced by adolescents.

## Abstract

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.