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

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.