Social defining of the risk behaviors is rooted in a diverse, multidimensional world of norms, values, rituals and discourses. Including social contexts of engaging in the risk behaviors and production of knowledge about them allowed us to go beyond standard cause-and-effect descriptions and examine these actions as an essential element of everyday practices and rituals of youth. The aim of this paper was to analyze the risk behaviors of youth in the framework of sociological categories of risk, reflexivity and interactional order. The paper is based on the results of the qualitative study conducted within the project “Problem Behaviors of Youth – Study in the Opole Region 2019–2020,” that attempted to capture the ways of defining and explaining the risk behaviors by the school youth, teachers and counselors. Such a sociological perspective bridges the gap in the prevention scholarship connected to insufficient attention paid to social ways of defining and meaning making connected to the risk behaviors of youth.
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