2 | 65 A new life stage, a new sport activity? DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Discussion In this study, we questioned the relationship between starting a sport and the occurrence of six major life events, namely, starting paid employment, moving out to live on one’s own, starting to cohabit or getting married, birth of one’s first child, children leaving the parental home and retirement. Our aim was to contribute to the literature by determining the extent that these events played a role in starting a sport and the organisational form of the sport chosen. We used sport career information on 2707 respondents from the Sporters Monitor 2010. The Sporters Monitor traces sport careers and additionally offers information regarding the age at which the six major life events occurred. Using event history analysis, we examined how the life events related to the odds of starting a sport. Our general expectation from a resource perspective was that experiencing the six major life events would lead to changes in time availability and social resources, which in turn would result in an increased or decreased odds of starting a sport in general, and more particularly, starting a sport in a demanding organisational form, that is, a competitive club setting. Contrary to our expectation, derived from the idea of increasing time pressure (Kraaykamp et al., 2009), starting a paid job was in fact related to increased odds of starting a sport. Time constraints certainly intensify when people enter paid employment. However, changes also seem to occur in social resources (e.g., due to the engagement in a new professional network and moving house), which could explain the greater chance of starting a sport upon this life transition. This suggests that changes in social (work-related) resources are more important as an explanatory mechanism behind the effects of starting a paid job, than changes in temporal resources. Indeed, sport participation offers those in a new living and working environment a relatively low-threshold means of making new contacts (Elling, 2007; Putnam, 1995; Seippel, 2006). Additionally, an alternative explanation is that people are stimulated by their new work environment to take part in sports, for example those practised by co-workers and in company teams. In line with our hypothesis, the odds of starting a sport were also larger when someone left the parental home to live on their own. Here, too, the opportunity to make new social contacts via sport seems to provide the most likely
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