Survey Research on Adult Education: Existing Challenges and New Opportunities |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Kerstin Hoenig (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Erik Nylander (Linköping University) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Verena Ortmanns (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning) |
| Coordinator 4 | Professor Sylvia Rahn (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning) |
Compared to other sectors of the education system, Adult Education research is dominated by qualitative research, with a lower volume of publications using survey data. Surveys targeting adult learners, education providers or professionals often face similar problems due to the fragmented and unstructured nature of adult education and lifelong learning: Learning activities tend to be nonformal or informal, short and infrequent, there is a wide range of topics, courses and certificates, and the landscape of education providers is vast and ever-changing. This can lead to problems in sampling, recruiting and retention of survey subjects. This is especially true for complex stratified samples and panel studies. Cross-country comparisons are also complicated to conduct as each country has somewhat idiosyncratic adult learnings systems, with institutional infrastructures that differ in size and layout.
Nevertheless, multiple international and national surveys of adult education providers, professionals and learners exist, with PIAAC and the Adult Education Survey as the most well-known. Furthermore, recent developments in spatial data, machine learning, and web crawling have opened new opportunities for data collection, combinations of existing data sources, and mixed methods research.
In this session, we want to foster a dialogue between researchers who collect and analyze survey data on adult education, broadly defined. We welcome submissions of substantive research as well as methodological contributions. We especially invite submissions of innovative research designs or methods, efforts to combine survey data with other data sources, and international comparisons.