Towards a model for analysing adolescents' reflexivity: Reflectiveness, criticality and boundedness

Abstract

Reflexivity has received relatively little analytic attention in discussions of younger adolescents' agency. Using interview data from a sample of South Korean adolescents, this paper explores whether and how they manifested reflexivity concerning the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on their own occupational prospects. Through combining and adapting existing theorisations, it proposes a heuristic model for analysing adolescents' reflexivity based on three interrelated continua: reflectiveness, criticality and boundedness. It is hoped this model will facilitate a more nuanced understanding of how adolescents' agency is constructed in relation to their developing capacity for reflexivity and the impacts of structural inequalities upon it.