120 | Chapter 14 2016b; European Commission, 2014; Lunn, 2010; Pilgaard, 2013; Scheerder et al., 2006). Similarly, previous findings have not associated starting a job with ending sport club membership (Van Houten et al., 2017; the study presented in the previous chapter). This might indicate that other life events, experienced during adolescence (before leaving full-time education and beginning work, like entering secondary education), play a more import role in dropping out of club sport. Additionally, continued unemployment may lead to apathy (Vansteenkiste & Van den Broeck, 2014), not only towards finding a job, but also towards other social activities (Hobbins, 2016). From this perspective, it seems plausible that individuals who begin to work are more likely than those who do not work at all to keep practising sport in a club setting and not switch to a “lighter”, less demanding setting, despite pressure exerted by their new social role and responsibilities. This would be worthwhile topics for future research. While these findings shed new light on the continuation of sport during the transition to adulthood, some limitations bear mentioning, as well as additional suggestions for future research. First, we used panel data with a four-year gap between waves. The occurrence of major life events during this gap might not yet have produced significant changes in sport participation, especially if an event occurred close to wave 2, if a gradual change or acceptance of the transition was at work. This possible “impact lag” could explain why, with respect to the effect of cohabitation/marriage on the number of sports, we did find between-person differences (which could reflect long-term effects) but not within-person changes (likely to reflect short-term effects, at least in this study with only a four-year gap between two waves). In future research, applying long-term longitudinal as well as qualitative methods (like in the next chapter) for within-person effects, and comparing men and women, could provide valuable further information on when and how life events, separately or cumulatively, impact individual resources and lead to changes in sport participation. Second, the available data on sport frequency were not very detailed, with ordinal categories ranging from “not at all” to “4 times or more per month”, per sport activity. We recoded this to the approximate number of times someone participated in sport per month in total, settling for the fact that this could slightly differ from the actual sport frequency. In addition, as a consequence of the original ordinal data, changes in sport frequency between the twowaves that staywithin the range of one answer category, areunexposed.
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