130 | Chapter 15 al., 2012; Engel & Nagel, 2011; Tiessen-Raaphorst et al., 2010). We explore sport participation during the transition to adulthood and the impact of major life events that mark this transition within two life domains: the professional career (e.g., becoming a student, graduation or leaving fulltime education, starting a job) and the family domain (e.g., engaging in an intimate relationship, cohabitation, marriage, becoming a parent: birth 1st child, 2nd child, etc.). The rationale for this particular focus is that, based on earlier studies (in particular those presented in the previous chapters), we identified the transition to adulthood as a threat to sustainable sport participation and these life domains as being important areas of personal development in general and sport participation in particular in this period within the life course. Second, in order to gain in-depth insights in the considerations, choices and changes that people make in their everyday lives and the factors that affect this, we turn to a micro-level analysis of their lived experiences. Particularly well-placed for this is a narrative approach in which people’s accounts of their daily lives are gathered and studied closely (Jansen et al., 2018). Narratives, or stories, provide insight in people’s insiders’ perspectives because (a) they provide simplified accounts of social processes and cause-and-effect relations from the perspective of the storyteller, (b) they show how storytellers assign moral responsibilities to social actors, and (c) they reflect the social positions of storyteller and listener (Tilly, 2006). In a narrative a storyteller connects personal rationales, motives, considerations and identities with actors and events in time and place on her own terms devoid of cognitive or specialist reasoning (Bruner, 2010; Tilly, 2004). Narratives, as personal sense-making constructions, thus provide the level of detail needed to discover the subjective mechanisms in how individuals deal with the social complexity of their life worlds in general and to trace the mechanisms underlying the relation between major life events and sport participation in particular. Third, it is important to note that narratives represent subjective experiences of these mechanisms. Taking people’s narratives and their subsequent narrative truths (as opposed to historical or objective truth; see Spence, 1982) serious connects with the Thomas theorem: “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, p. 572). That is: if people attribute significance to certain factors influencing their opportunities to participate in sport, they will act upon them, even if these can be considered objectively as having only marginal effect. Moreover, the experienced impact
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