Analysis of The whole Sample

Overall analysis of the whole sample indicates that higher education has been achieved by less than a quarter of the group, whereas 35% have not attained high school graduation (see Table 1). Nonetheless the majority of the women (79%) are desirous of further learning experiences. Women of all ages, incomes and educational levels crave the opportunity to learn. Half of our sample were on a total family income of less than $20,000 with one-fifth on less than $10,000 per year (see Table 4) - despite the fact that 69% of the women were employed.

In times of inflation such incomes would allow little extra funds for anything which may not be considered a necessity. Yet it appears that most of these women consider increasing their knowledge through taking courses a priority if not a necessity. 77 women responded to the question of how much money they would have available for a course - the average amount quoted was $140.00. 124 women responded to the distance question and the average number of miles they would be prepared to travel to take a course was 26 miles. These figures substantiate the enthusiasm of women for taking courses.

The major reason for taking a course was given by 74% of the women as being to become better informed. Only 35% would take a course for purely job-related reasons (see Table 5, Graph l1). In general the women had a wide range of interests related to both their personal and professional lives. From Table 6 we can observe that the two most popular courses overall were stress management and computer training - each quoted by over 30% of the total sample. But in many cases they encountered problems in accessing the courses they desired. The obstacle cited by the largest number of women was the inconvenient times courses were offered - 73% of the sample had a problem in this area. Lack of information about courses, lack of availability of courses; and unavailability of part-time courses were the three other most commonly mentioned barriers to learning 57% of the women mentioned lack of money as a problem (see Table 7, Graph 18). It should also be noted that 60% of the women had children living at home. It is interesting to observe at this stage that two of the least often quoted obstacles to learning were age and learning difficulties.