Social Practices
Social practices approach assists in understanding the complex interrelationships between structure and agency that shape the exposome, potential mediators and outcomes of children and adolescents through everyday practices. A social-practices approach highlights that physical, social and internal exposures in a life-course perspective (i.e., the total exposome) are dependent on the “Materials”, “Competences” and “Meanings” and involved in the practices of children and adolescents, like playing games, being with friends, attending school or pre-school, eating dinner or interacting with social media. For younger children we also need to recognise the relevance of other actors and their social practices for exposome in children, e.g., parenting, working and teaching. With social practices at the heart of investigation, we will neither emphasise the overarching structures and values that distribute exposure nor the behaviours of the individual. Instead, we will focus on the very nexus where these two meet and overlap. This will make it easier to understand inter- and intragroup differences in relation to exposome, mediators and outcomes, since structures and values will enable, restrain and shape practices differently between groups of children and adolescents. Social practice theory offers a significant contribution to the development of a child perspective to the exposome as it further develops the structure-agency nexus, focusing on its materialisation as practice. These entities (materials, competences and meanings) are the basis for understanding a given practice. It should be noted that a social practice is not a synonym for individual behaviour.