Early adolescence is a time when a transition away from sport and physical activity participation is at its highest level among female youth (Hedstrom & Gould, 2004). This has led to the identification of barriers and facilitators of physical activity participation for adolescent females. Consequently there have been calls to overcome barriers and augment facilitators via the creation of gender-relevant programming. Despite these calls and efforts, a gender disparity remains, and a detailed understanding of how girls experience and interpret physical activity within the context of their lives is still lacking. The current project aimed to gain further insight into the foregoing using tenets of Interpretive Phenomenology to further understand the lived physical activity experiences of females during early adolescence, delineating their barriers to participation and the factors enabling participation. Five themes were identified and made into vignettes to facilitate understanding from adolescent females' perspectives: friends or don't know anyone, good or not good enough, fun or not fun; good feeling or gross; and peer support or peer pressure. The physical activity promotion implications for female youth are discussed within the context of these themes.

• Please provide 3-5 bullet points of the study.

• Inductive qualitative methodologies can encourage the much-needed voice of female youth in sport and physical activity research.

• Vignettes serve, not only as a method to illustrate data, but also as a medium to teach contextually relevant information to participants and sport science service providers.

• The barriers and solutions to female youth engagement in physical activity are best understood through the perspectives of the intended participant.

• Female youth can serve as central informants in the development and analysis of research projects relating to female youth physical activity.