36 | Chapter 1 in three of the four studies. However, survey questions referred to personal behaviours that were relatively easy to remember, for example, the age at which an event occurred, ages of starting and stopping, participation context and frequency (Engel & Nagel, 2011). Participants of the narrative interviews told more in-dept about their sport participation in relation to the occurrence of life events, digging deeper in their memory. But given the importance of the life events investigated they were able to address their experiences clearly in their stories, resulting in valuable, insightful narrative information. Therefore, there is no reason to expect any large bias overall in the retrospective studies of this dissertation. Nevertheless, employing panel data in future research might be a very useful alternative, providing a great way to follow people over time and prevent recall bias. I did so in the study described in Chapter 3, but this presented the third limitation. I used panel data consisting of two waves with a four-year gap. 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 the second wave, if a gradual change or acceptance of the transition was at work. In this regard, more pronounced and detailed effects of major life events on sport participation might be found if panel data over a longer period of time, preferably with more waves, is employed. This should be taken into consideration in future research. The focus of my studies presents two limitations in the scope of this dissertation. First, even though a strength of this dissertation is that I pay specific attention to the transition to adulthood, it means I largely neglect other life phases or transitions and associated major life events, except for children leaving the parental home and retirement in my study on starting a sport. To further enhance our understanding of sport participation over the whole life course, future research could investigate sport participation during other life phases and the life events that mark them. For example, childhood and adolescence, generally marked by education-related events like starting primary and secondary school, and middle age and old age, generally associated with different employment-, relationship-, and healthrelated events like changing work conditions and quitting or losing a job, getting divorced, becoming a widow, and getting a major illness (Gropper et al., 2020). Further, it could be interesting to consider the impact of sportrelated events as well, like becoming injured, promotion/relegation to the higher/lower division, winning a competition or tournament, and getting a new trainer or coach. Second, with my focus on the impact of major life events and
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