22 | Chapter 1 fathers with at least one young child (aged 6 months through 8 years). For the individual narrative interviews, semi-structured guides were constructed based on its specific requirements for the application of a narrative method. The interview guides aimed at activating a storytelling mode in the participant and inviting them to share their insiders’ perspectives on how they experienced and dealt with the occurrence of life events in relation to sport participation, and the dynamics of actors, resources, and constraints regarding practising sport, particularly during the transition to adulthood. This resulted in a data set consisted of 1082 narratives providing insights the mechanisms underlying the effects of life events on sport participation during this transition. Measuring sport participation Sport participation is the key dependent variable in this dissertation. In all empirical chapter’s sport participation is operationalised as a dynamic variable that is measured over time. To get a broad and comprehensive understanding of the effects of major life events, sport participation is measured in various ways throughout this thesis: from starting a sport to stopping a sport, in general and in a club setting, and more subtle changes in between. In the first two empirical chapters, I utilise the retrospective life course data from the SportersMonitor 2010 to measure starting a sport in general and starting a competitive club sport (Chapter 2) and stopping a sport in general and ending a sport club membership (Chapter 3) in a given year. For starting a sport, the value of 1 was assigned in the years in which a respondent started a sport, and a 0 in all other years. For starting a competitive club sport, I assigned a value of 4 to the years in which a respondent started a sport in a competitive club setting. I assigned a value of 3, 2 and 1, respectively, to the years in which a respondent started a sport in a recreational club setting, some other formal setting and on an informal basis. In the years in which no sport was started, I assigned a 0. In the years in which respondents started two or more sports in different organisational forms, I assigned the value for the most intensive or “heavy” organisational form. Stopping a sport was similarly coded as starting a sport, scoring 1 in years in which a respondent stopped practising a sport, and 0 in years they did not stop practising sport. Ending a sport club membership was scored 1 for years in which a respondent ended membership in a sport club, and 0 in all other years. In Chapter 4, I turn to more subtle changes in sport participation, utilising the
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