48 | Chapter 12 we examine not only starting a sport in a general sense, but also in what context individuals did this, zooming in particularly on becoming active in a competitive club setting. The central research question is as follows: to what extent are starting a sport in general and starting a competitive club sport affected by major life events? To answer this research question, we used unique, detailed retrospective information about the life course and the sport behaviour of 2707 adults from the Dutch Sporters Monitor 2010 of the Mulier Institute and NOC*NSF (Van den Dool, 2010). Using event history analyses we investigated the association between the occurrence of the six abovementioned life events and starting a sport, in general and in a competitive club setting in particular. THEORIES AND EXPECTATIONS How major life events relate to sport participation can be better understood by considering the life events as transitions to increased or decreased resources and constraints. In this paragraph, first, we describe this theoretical resource perspective in general. Then, in the sections that follow, we present in more detail our theoretical rationale for each of the six major life events from the Sporters Monitor 2010, resulting in hypotheses on how they affect the odds of starting a sport in general and the odds of starting a competitive club sport in particular. Major life events can change people’s time availability, but also their social, economic, physical and cultural resources. Because the major life events studied here do not in themselves directly influence a person’s physical condition, and we do not (cannot) examine school or educational transitions, our theoretical discussion below bypasses changes in physical and cultural resources. Nor do we consider economic resources, as an earlier study found that financial constraints play only a very limited role in the choice of whether or not to take part in sport (Tiessen-Raaphorst et al., 2010). That is, sport participation exhibits minimal price elasticity, so participation in sport does not change very readily when it becomes more expensive, cheaper, or even is offered for free (Késenne, 2011). Our specific focus here is changes in time
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