In his analyses between the groups within each major category of attrition/persistence, he did confirm Diekhoff and Diekhoff's (1984) finding that dropouts were looking for work and dropped out if a job was obtained. He also confirmed that obtaining a GED correlated positively with persistence (i.e. completion of program).

Because of his findings, Bosma concluded that:

quantitatively oriented criteria presently used to assess attrition and persistence at ABE education sites is unrealistic and at best, very limited in scope, particularly when one considers the nature of the population being served.(p. 85)

He followed this conclusion with a plea for more attention to the largely ignored qualitative effects on people's lives such as increases in self-esteem, persistence in coming to a program at all and a diminution of the practices of labelling and typecasting students engaged in ABE learning situations. He also stressed that more effort should go into exploring ways to attract the vast majority of the target population.

The work of Charnley and Jones (1979) in Britain provided the ABE literacy field with five groupings of achievements upon which success could be judged. The groupings were: affective personal achievements; affective social achievements; socio-economic achievements; cognitive achievements; and, enactive achievements. Evaluating ABE literacy students according to these criteria could affect notions of attrition.