3 | 93 When do young adults stop practising a sport? design, deriving concrete hypotheses from theory, and investigating multiple major life events, it also has some limitations. First, the retrospective design of the questionnaire may have caused recall bias, since respondents might have difficulty remembering when certain events occurred, for example, when they stopped participating in a sport. However, because we focused on four major life events, there is no reason to expect any large bias overall. With respect to stopping participation in a sport, recall bias is probably somewhat larger, as reflected in the relatively high risks found for stopping at “round” ages, such as 25, 30 and 35. Such recall bias likely reduced the chance of finding a perfect match between a life event and dropping out of a sport, so it would actually have produced a stricter test of our expectations. Additionally, people may exhibit particular behaviour ahead of time, in the knowledge that they are on the verge of experiencing a major life event, and life events may become influential only after a certain amount of time has elapsed. For future research, it would be interesting to employ panel data, as in the next chapter, to analyse causal relations between life events and changes in sport participation even more thoroughly. Another limitation of the current study is the lack in the SportersMonitor of direct dynamic information on respondents’ temporal and social resources. We could therefore only indirectly relate life events to changes in resources. It is for this reason that we developed a theoretical framework to explain why changes in temporal and social resources might cause people to stop practising a sport. However, for future research it would be preferable to also have direct measurements of leisure time and social contacts and to relate changes in these resources to stopping a sport. Our study enhanced our understanding of when and why young adults might stop practising a sport or end a sport club membership. Our life-course and resource approach enabled us to determine that major life events indeed play a decisive role in this process. We found that when experiencing life events young adults change their sport participation to fit their shifting needs, resources and restrictions. Therefore, life events can trigger transitions from active sport episodes to episodes of sport inactivity (Engel & Nagel, 2011), but they can also produce more subtle transitions between different forms or modes of sport that are more or less flexible, time-consuming, social and competitive (Van Houten et al., 2014). Future research can build on these insights, not only by addressing the effect of life events on sport participation
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