story by Claire Miller
Adults with low literacy levels can face difficulties applying for jobs, reading and understanding health information and making other crucial decisions in their daily lives.
These stressors can have a profound impact on this population, but there are few research studies that have focused specifically on adult learners’ stress levels and how they deal with these struggles.
To address this gap, a team of Georgia State University researchers – including faculty members Ken Rice, Daphne Greenberg, Sarah Carlson and Claire Spears and alumni Michelle Aiello and Barbara S. Durán – conducted a study to better understand the stress, traumatic experiences, resilience and psychological distress that adults with low literacy levels experience.
Psychologists have developed written assessments to measure the four focus areas of this study. However, these assessments can be more difficult to administer to adults who struggle with reading.
The Georgia State research team adapted four such assessments, including the Perceived Stress Scale, the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale and K6 Psychological Distress Scale, to make them more accessible to this population of adults.
The 23 study participants were split up into small groups. Each group was assigned a researcher who administered the questions verbally and in written form, providing examples to help participants understand how to respond to each question. Also, there were a few research assistants assigned to each group to help answer participants' questions.
“Based on their attentiveness, task involvement and questions, they seemed to benefit from the session leader reading the directions and items,” the researchers wrote. “They also seemed to benefit from having other research assistants in the room because they frequently raised their hands when they needed individual assistance with any questions or issues. They also acknowledged clearer understanding when the research assistants provided assistance.”
The study’s results, published in the Adult Literacy Education Journal, indicate that this population experiences higher levels of perceived stress on average compared to other adults, and they expressed lower levels of resilience in the face of stress. Participants were at a much higher risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (77 percent) compared to the general population (7 percent).
The findings – and the methods they used to administer this study to adult learners – can be instructive for future research and policy decisions that affect adults with low literacy levels.
“Results provide preliminary empirical evidence that supports adult literacy practitioner reports that many of their learners appear to experience high levels of stress, anxiety and depression,” the research team wrote. “As policymakers and researchers attempt to create and implement curricular modifications to facilitate an increase in adult foundational academic skills, more attention is warranted on the psychosocial needs of the adult literacy learner population.”