92 | Chapter 1 3 framework and to test our theoretical expectations, we reconstructed the sport career histories and occurrence of the aforementioned life events in young adulthood for 3540 Dutch citizens and used event history analyses to deal with causality and the timing of life events. By doing so, we contributed to the literature, as most earlier studies are cross-sectional, lack theoretical rigour and focus on one major life event. We conclude that all four life events play a role in explaining the sport participation of young adults. When young adults strike off to live on their own and start to cohabit or marry, they are at greater risk of stopping participation in a sport or ending a sport club membership. In line with our theoretical rationale based on a resource approach, this is likely explained by relocation to a newphysical and/or social environment and the onset of new time-consuming activities that are obligatory and fixed, while perhaps also offering higher social payoffs than existing sport activities. These life events disrupt existing routines and make it harder and less important or relevant to create or use leisure time slots to continue sport activities. This also applies to young women when their first child is born, which increases their risk to stop practising a sport and end a sport club membership, though young men are not affected by this life event. This suggests that a traditional ethic of care and women’s role as the primary caregiver within the family are still prominent (Miller & Brown, 2005). These gender roles and differences and the way they affect the impact of life events on sport participation would be a worthwhile topic for future research. When young adults enter employment, this affects only their general risk to stop practising a sport and not their risk of ending a sport club membership. Although young adults usually have less leisure time and more social and professional obligations when they start working, they do not appear to give up or trade their sport club membership for alternative activities. We believe this is because sport club participation is considered a relatively obligatory and regularly scheduled activity with high social payoffs in the local setting. In this regard, a study of sport contexts (e.g., in a traditional sport club, in a health centre or individually) and geographical settings (e.g., practising sport within the neighbourhood or elsewhere) could provide valuable further information. This is all the more relevant because sport contexts, practices and services have become increasingly diversified and de-traditionalised (Borgers et al., 2013; Klostermann & Nagel, 2014). Although our study improved upon previous ones by applying a longitudinal
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