5 | 131 Career, family, and sport participation: a simultaneous exhibition? of major life events is hard to measure. Considering that the realistic impact of life events on sport participation is not just determined by objective effects, but to a great extent by the subjective interpretation and appraisal of the events (John et al., 2019), the insiders’ perspectives on these impacts thus provide an integral and fine-grained data source on howpeople realistically experience and deal with the occurrence of life events and the dynamics of actors, resources and constraints in their lives. In this way, narrative subjective data provide valuable qualitative insights in the mechanisms underlying the effects of major life events on sport participation that is complimentary to quantitative data gathered with survey studies (Gropper et al., 2020), like the ones presented in the previous chapters. This can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how changes in participation and nonparticipation in sport occur during the transition to adulthood (Scheerder et al., 2006). Our central research question is as follows: why and how do people change their sport participation during the transition to adulthood, specifically when major life events occur? To answer this question, we gathered and analysed a data set consisting of 1082 narratives from 46 interviews with Dutch adults, containing well-saturated information on sport participation during the transition to adulthood and the role and impact of life events within the career and family domain, from their own perspectives. We report on this empirical investigation and based on the findings we discuss implications for promoting sustained sport participation. METHODOLOGY Participants and data collection To answer our research question, we draw from narrative interviews with 46 Dutch adults conducted between May 2016 and December 2018. All participants were living in Nijmegen or Lingewaard, two neighbouring municipalities in the centre of the Arnhem Nijmegen City Region in the
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