TABLE II

THE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Life Style Outcomes examines participants’ achievements and challenges in the areas of continuing education, employment, home, family, and community involvement. Lending depth to this analysis is an examination of the impact of parents’ educational involvement on their welfare status, level of employment, financial security and children’s educational attainment. This chapter also deals with problem areas such as balancing employment responsibilities with further schooling and the difficulties inherent in finding financial support for higher education. It closes with an examination of the relationship between basic skills improvement, self-esteem and a commitment to helping others in the family, the classroom and the community.

Limitations

There are several limitations of this study of which the reader should be aware:

• The eight research associates proved expert in conducting the participant interviews and Quality of Life Inventories. However, they did not see to it that participants answered all the Impact Survey questions. As a result, there were several items with low response rates. Information provided by the Success Stories booklets and the Informal Interviews were used, as available, to supplement data missing from the Impact Survey.
• While data in this study were self-reported, the use of four separate instruments (Success Stories Booklets, the Informal Interview, the Impact Survey and the QOLI) provided a means of checking responses. Furthermore, data about participants’ past and current lives and attitudes were volunteered in response to open-ended interview questions asked prior to the specific details required for the Impact Study.
• There was no control group in this study. Nevertheless, a case could be made for participants as their own comparison group provided you compare the facts supplied by participants’ sponsors for the Success Stories nominations with the data provided by participants during the follow up interviews. The time-differential between the two strands varies from one year to 22 years. A future comparison of the study group with a matched group of current ABLE participants should be enlightening.
• The descriptive report compiled by Dr. Gacka in Chapter III differs significantly in its style of writing from the remainder of the study as written by Dr. Royce. As such, it stands on its own for readers who feel more comfortable with statistics than with oral history. For my part, it provides a sturdy skeleton upon which to rest the living, breathing flesh of anecdote.