Of the increasing population of adult students in higher education, women constitute the fastest growing segment. Often, they must overcome not only institutional or situational barriers but also dispositional barriers in their pursuit of higher education. This study examined the internal, personal qualities that enable adult women students to develop the resilience to overcome such obstacles and attain academic achievement and persistence. The purpose of the study was to identify, describe, and analyze the factors or processes contributing to resilience in adult women students in higher education.
The study utilized a multimethod design to determine the degree of conformity between qualitative findings obtained from interviews and two quantitative measures relating to adult women's dispositions toward persisting in higher education: the Resilience Scale (Wagnild & Young, 1987) and the Adult Persistence in Learning Scale (MacKinnon-Slaney, 1992). Non-probabilistic, purposive sampling allowed for the selection of subjects who met key selection criteria. The two scales and a demographic questionnaire were completed by 54 subjects, eleven of whom participated in interviews so that a dimension of depth, detail, and meaning could complement the quantitative findings.
The findings of this study identified the dispositional factors that enabled the participants to develop the resilience to achieve academically and persist in higher education. The findings included their perceptions of the processes for developing those protective factors. Perseverance and flexibility emerged as the primary components of their perceptions of resilience; risk-taking and a sense of self-efficacy emerged as the critical elements of the process of developing resilience.
The study concludes with recommendations for practice to promote the development of resilience in adult women students in higher education as well as recommendations for further research. Specifically, studies might focus on more diverse populations, such as women from varying ethnic and cultural backgrounds or in nontraditional areas of study, such as technology, science, and engineering. Studies should also include an examination of self-defined rather than externally defined outcomes to add a dimension thus far unexplored in resilience research. A question to be addressed in research continues to be whether resilience, an internal process, can be created through external interventions.