Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults - Further Investigation: Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey

Introduction

Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults presents a number of findings on the distribution of English literacy skills among Pasifika adults. Many of the findings bear further investigation. In particular, the relationships between these findings may shed some light on the changing distribution of English literacy skills among Pasifika adults. The purpose of the current work is to begin this investigation. We will first describe the relevant findings and the questions they raise, and then describe our investigation.

The findings are concerned with:

• Changes between 1996 and 2006 among some Pasifika population subgroups in English literacy skill-levels.
• Differences in patterns of change in prose and document literacy.
• Marked changes between 1996 and 2006 in the distribution of educational attainment among Pasifika adults.
• Marked changes between 1996 and 2006 in the distribution of language most frequently spoken when at home among Pasifika adults.
  

For example, between 1996 and 2006 the percentages of Pasifika adults with level 3, 4, or 5 prose literacy decreased (by around 9 percentage points for men and 6 percentage points for women)³. For document literacy, the pattern of change was somewhat different. The percentage of adult Pasifika men with level 3, 4, or 5 document literacy remained relatively stable (dropping by around 2 percentage points) whereas that for adult Pasifika women increased (by around 5 percentage points)⁴.

Over the same period, the percentages of Pasifika adults with an upper-secondary level education or a tertiary⁵ education increased markedly (by 35 percentage points for upper secondary and 5 percentage points for tertiary)⁶ and the percentage of Pasifika adults who most frequently spoke a language other than English when in the home also increased markedly (by around 14 percentage points)⁷.

These findings raise questions about the relationships between educational attainment, familiarity with the English language and English literacy among the adult Pasifika population. Certainly, individuals who are less familiar with English or who have low levels of education are more likely to have lower English literacy skills (and this is quantified in Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults). What is less certain is the extent to which each of educational attainment and familiarity with English is (statistically) associated with English literacy. In other words:

For Pasifika adults, is educational attainment or is familiarity with English most closely associated with English literacy?

To investigate this question comprehensively would require longitudinal data. Unfortunately, the IALS and ALL surveys were not designed to address this type of question — they are not longitudinal. Moreover, there were too few Pasifika respondents to the IALS survey to allow meaningful use of the IALS data in addressing the above question. However, the oversample of Pasifika adults in the ALL survey does allow meaningful use of the ALL data and we can attempt to answer the above question in this context.

The IALS and ALL surveys measure two types of English literacy (prose literacy and document literacy), and some of the patterns of change in distribution of prose literacy skill that occurred between 1996 (IALS) and 2006 (ALL) are different to those for document literacy skill over the same period.

One could hypothesise that because it is more text dependent, prose literacy would be more closely associated than document literacy with familiarity with English but that both forms of literacy could be roughly equally closely associated with educational attainment. Hence, according to this hypothesis, the increasing proportion of Pasifika adults with higher levels of educational attainment would explain increases in literacy skill levels. These increases would be offset by decreases (more marked for prose than for document literacy) in literacy skill levels explained by the increasing proportion of Pasifika adults who most frequently speak a language other than English in the home. The net changes would be roughly those reported in Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults. The extent to which this rather tidy hypothesis matches reality leads to the following question:

For Pasifika adults, are the different patterns of change in prose and document literacy between 1996 and 2006 attributable to different relationships between educational attainment, familiarity with English and each of these two forms of English literacy evident in the ALL data?

To address these questions, a statistical regression model of each of prose literacy and document literacy among Pasifika adults was constructed using the ALL data. The various factors associated with English literacy described in The Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey: Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults were also included in the models to give them further validity. These factors are age, gender, labour force status, educational attainment, language most frequently spoken when at home, first language, place of birth and income. The models were constructed in three stages:

1. excluding time spent in formal education and income as potential explanatory factors;
2. including income but excluding time spent in formal education as a potential explanatory factor;
3. including both income and time spent in formal education.
   

This staggered inclusion of factors allows some insight into the relationships between the explanatory factors (notably income), as well as their relationships with prose and document literacy. Income was chosen as part of this staggered inclusion of factors because is a widely used indicator of social well-being.

Footnotes

3. See Figure 2.2 of Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults.
   
4. See Figure 2.3 of Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults.
   
5. ‘Lower secondary or less’ means completed at most Year 10, ‘higher secondary’ means completed more than Year 10 but no more than Year 13, and ‘tertiary’ means participated in a tertiary education programme.
   
6. See Figure 4.1 of: Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults.
   
7. See Figure 5.1 of Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults.