Meaningfulness in youth sport participation: a life-course perspective from China

This study explores how Chinese adult men narrate their sport participation and how meaningfulness develops across participation trajectories. While school physical education (PE) is often positioned in policy and research as a key foundation for lifelong sport participation, less is known about how school-based experiences are remembered and connected to later engagement in sport. Drawing on an interpretivist qualitative framework, data were generated through semi-structured interviews and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings suggest that meaningful sport participation does not appear from a single moment or educational intervention. Instead, meaningfulness developed gradually through accumulated experience of competence, relational practices, and later interpretive reflection. Participants described badminton as becoming meaningful as it was integrated into everyday routines, social relationships, personal beliefs, and emerging identities. At the same time, secondary-school PE was rarely narrated as a direct source of meaningful sport experiences. Its value appeared more indirect, as an infrastructural condition that provided temporal and spatial opportunities for informal peer-based participation. This research highlights the importance of understanding sport participation as a relational and developmental process across the life course, and suggests that the value of PE may extend beyond formal pedagogical outcomes to include its role in enabling informal participation within everyday school environments.