Modern directions in studying adolescents’ personal agency

The relevance of the study is determined by the rapid growth in the number of studies on adolescents’ personal agency that require analysis. The personal agency of adolescents is increasingly viewed not just as a natural phenomenon of development, but as a desired teaching and educational result that attracts attention of psychologists and educators. This indicates the necessity for a clearer understanding of its development. The research objective is to identify modern trends in studying the adolescent’s personal agency and to describe the features of personal agency at this age based on the empirical data. Main results: the following areas of studying adolescents’ personal agency have been identified: the development of characteristics of personal agency of adolescents, personal agency of adolescents in the context of social environment, problems of personality development, adolescent giftedness, and the issue of applying the concept of personal agency in psychotherapy. Peculiarities of the adolescent’s personal agency include uneven development of its components, a possibility of the personal agency development within a certain type, dependence on the environmental support, and the correlation between the level of the personal agency development and certain behavioral features (dependent behavior, victim behavior, and intercession behavior). Conclusions: the variety of research directions in studying adolescents’ personal agency allows us to summarize the development of a separate research field and to strengthen the position of adolescents’ personal agency as a phenomenon under study in modern science. Practical significance of the research lies in the coverage of modern methods of diagnosing subjective characteristics in adolescence; the relevant research problems have also been highlighted.