Developing a sense of human agency in childhood and adolescence through participatory experiences: enabling contexts and agentic qualities

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Girls, boys and adolescents are entitled to participation rights and citizenship status. To this should be added the recognition of their human agency, given that it is from their condition as agents that they will be able to exercise their rights autonomously. This study aims to identify the elements that enable children and adolescents to develop a sense of human agency, comparing their accounts of their participatory experiences in educational centres, leisure time and youth centres, family environments, digital environments and Childhood and Adolescence Councils. METHOD. Using a qualitative meta-synthesis analysis design (QMS), the data collected in three studies with a common research focus are analysed to reinterpret them and generate new knowledge. The QMS integrates the accounts of 150 children and adolescents between the ages of 8 and 18 years of age collected in 17 group discussions. The analysis is carried out in four phases: familiarisation, establishment of relationships, translation and synthesis of units and categories, and synthesis of results through narrative descriptions. RESULTS. Two thematic units are identified, the enabling context and the agentic qualities, together with their corresponding categories. Enabling contexts favour the development of a sense of agency and the exercise of human agency by children and adolescents. Agentic qualities are the attributes that children and adolescents express with respect to their sense of agency. DISCUSSION. There are significant differences in the development of children’s and adolescents’ sense of agency depending on the context and the roles in which the participatory experiences unfold, with those that take place as democratic citizenship being the ones that genuinely favour it. The identified elements provide aframework for creating enabling contexts that allow the recognition and development of childrenand adolescents’ sense of human agency through genuine democratic participation.