Impact of Major Life Events on Former Athletes’ Adult Participation in Running
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper extends the growing body of leisure research related to impact of major life events into the realm of physical activity. Respondents were a homogenous group of 224 runners in the sense that all competed in varsity cross country at the intercollegiate level. This early-adult life similarity was deemed appropriate as it provides additional power to conclusions drawn regarding magnitude of major life events (none, minor, major) and impact (qualitative and quantitative) on later life participation. Respondents ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-90s, with an average age of just under 50. They reported on life events ranging from graduation, marriage, and addition of children, to changes in employment and residence, divorce, and death of a spouse. Data suggested that, on the whole, these highly involved and invested runners were relatively resilient to major events in their lives. Nearly 70% continued to run at some level. Respondents were more likely to report qualitative impact on running—sometimes positive, sometimes negative—than they were quantitative impact. The only exception to this rule was for addition of children to the family, and running less was, especially for women, the most common response. Although the majority of life events occurred during early adulthood, for example, graduation and marriage, those most challenging with respect to maintenance of running activity more often occurred a bit later in early midlife (children) and in middle age and beyond (serious injury and/or illness). Specific implications for practice are focused on those most impactful events. With respect to addition of children to the family, agencies are challenged to emphasize social support for young parents while remaining mindful of social norms that differentially impact men and women in this context. Proactive solutions are proposed for reducing likelihood and impact of serious running-related injuries, many of which focus on park and recreation agencies role in molding the built environment. As well, co-production opportunities with the sports medicine community are explored. The present research largely supports Whaley’s (2007) argument that impactful life events are spread over the entire lifespan and Carpenter and colleagues’ (multiple studies) conclusions regarding the complexity of interpreting life event impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".