Stories and experiences of adult learners with multiple life-role responsibilities in the early 21st century

Adult learners in the early 21st century are no longer the fringe group they once were because their numbers and their significance are both on the rise. Thus, the time is right to reframe our understanding about how adult learners of today perceive their experiences of going to school while also managing their other life-role responsibilities. Using this intended focus as a guide, this study sought to gain a better understanding of what it was like for the participants to experience this phenomenon by discovering, analyzing, and interpreting the lived experiences and perceptions they elected to share. Hermeneutic phenomenology was used as the research approach because it is a reliable choice when the goal is to analyze and interpret the experiences and perceptions of individuals involved in the same phenomenon in order to arrive at a common understanding of their combined experiences; an understanding this study calls the all-encompassing essence of experience. Interviews were used to collect the data, and a simplified textual data analysis process was created specifically for this study to analyze and interpret the data for its deeper meaning. The final result of the data analysis process was an all-encompassing essence of experience that centered on how all the participants expressed their perceptions in terms of their sense of desire, endurance, and purpose. These attributes were at the core of their collective experiences, and they potentially could be at the core of the experiences of other adult learners as well given the prevalence of these attributes found in the data collected for this study. Keywords: adult learner, hermeneutic phenomenology, life-role responsibilities, lived experienc