Takashi Yamashita is an associate professor of sociology, and a faculty in the Gerontology Ph.D. program and the Center for Aging Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) with a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in the School of Medicine. His areas of research are social determinants of health and well-being over the life course, health literacy, wider benefits of lifelong learning, gerontology education and social statistics education.
Phyllis A. Cummins is a Senior Research Scholar Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Gerontology at the Scripps Gerontology Center here at Miami University. Her research interests include work and retirement transitions, education and training for older workers, publicly sponsored employment and training programs, the role community colleges play in education and training for older adults, skill development over the life course, and economic security in retirement.
Episode Description
In the United States, like many countries, middle-aged and older workers are increasingly a larger proportion of the workforce. The needs of these workers is different than those you are younger and can run the gamut from educational to health needs. That's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Takashi Yamashita and Phyllis A. Cummins
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
In the United States, like many countries, middle aged and older workers are increasingly a larger proportion of the workforce. The needs of these workers are different than those who are younger and can run the gamut from educational to health needs. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami statistics department. Our guests today are Taka Yamashita, and Phyllis Cummins. Taka Yamashita is an associate professor of sociology and a faculty member in the Gerontology Ph. D. program, and the Center for Aging studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He also has a secondary appointment in the department of epidemiology and public health in the School of Medicine, and serves as an affiliate member of the Center for Research on Aging at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. His areas of research are social determinants of health and well being over the court life course, health literacy, wider benefits of lifelong learning, Gerontology education and social statistics education. Phyllis Commons is a senior research scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology in gerontology at the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University. Her research interests include work and retirement transitions, education and training for older workers, publicly sponsored employment and training programs, the role of community colleges and education and training for older adults skill development over the life course in economic security in retirement talk. And Phyllis, thank you both for joining us today.
John Bailer
It is great to have you both here. So Phyllis, and talk as such, it's such a treat to have you join us today. You know, I guess I wanted to start with the proverbial softball question. You know, this is the other one anyone can answer. You know, that's so how did you start working together?
Phyllis Cummins
Well talk and I went through the same PhD program at Miami doctoral program and social Gerontology in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology talk. It was two years ahead of me and he was actually my mentor. So we became friends. And right after I finished my PhD, I got funding for a commission paper to use data from the program for the National Assessment of Adult Competencies P ec data. So I worked on this commission paper. And as it turned out, I learned that taka had written an article using the predecessor survey. And taka Kun was at the isles ihls, which is the same PIAC measures, literacy, numeracy and problem solving skills. And adults. It's an international survey with at least the countries participating. So we were using US data. So once I learned that talk, it was quite familiar with those data, so we jointly proposed another conditional paper funded by the National Center for Education Statistics. So that sort of laid the groundwork for us to submit a grant application to the Institute for Education Sciences. So that began our collaboration. And that was, I guess, we submitted that in 2017. And we got our funding on the first try, which is quite unusual. And we had really a very good score. And I attribute that to talk. Because he is just such an excellent statistician that it was mixed methods, that project was mixed methods, and that we use the PIAC data. And then the qualitative portion was we interviewed key informants in about a dozen countries about their policies and practices for lifelong learning programs, adult education programs in their countries to try and help in foreign policy in the US.
John Bailer
And so can I just interrupt just for a quick sec. So what was the research question? This first funded project was worth exploring.
Takashi Yamashita
So one of the some of the things we worked on using the existing piak data is to describe the distribution of basic skills among adult population in the US, believe it or not, we don't have too much data on what you know basic skills such as literacy and numeracy among adults, how they are distributed. There are basic information from the PX study itself, most of the descriptive statistics of How many people have limited literacy skills in the US, it's estimated, depending on how you define limited literacy, some people say one in two, some other people say one in three, depending on how you want to define limited literacy. But we went above and beyond that, just descriptive, we decided to look at the differences across age groups, different socio demographic characteristics. So our goal, one of our goals, is to sort of develop a profile of skill distribution among US populations. And another thing, another sort of unique thing we did is that we had an unique opportunity to use existing cross sectional data to look at age period cohort, the effect of on literacy skills, this is somewhat unique, because there is no other data set that allows us to do it. And even though this is not perfect, we are looking at three cross sectional data. But there was an effort by the US Department of Education to make these three cross sectional data comparable. So we were able to use the best method we know to get at AGP, or the cohort effect. Obviously, how we approach this, initially, what we proposed was fairly simple. But later we learned more advanced techniques, we tried to apply that. And we are totally aware of these limitations. But I think we made a good effort to get at some somewhat complex issues of the age period cohort effect on adult basic skills in the US.
John Bailer
I mean, you said one, and two, or one and three with limited literacy, and that kind of, you know, caused me to just sit up immediately. That's, that seems dramatically high. So I mean, the natural question would be, what's the implication of having such a high proportion of the population with limited literacy? You know, I think about that, as you know, the stats and stories thing we do, we think about kind of consumption of news. And, you know, but then there's also this implication of, you know, what about if you're, if you're dealing with medical treatment or medical intervention, so what can you talk a little bit about some of these implications?
Phyllis Cummins
Well, I think we should also note that the US scored not high as compared to other countries. I mean, we were near the bottom, maybe there were three OECD countries lower than us. Do you remember exactly what that was taka?
Takashi Yamashita
I don't know. Exactly. The exact ranking. But I think the bottom five? Yeah. It was my recall.
Phyllis Cummins
Yeah, it's quite concerning and actually it did some analysis of health literacy, because there are measures of self rated health. And I think that low literacy scores were highly correlated with low self freedom health. But just the ability of the PFA to also measure numeracy and problem solving skills. So just critical thinking skills. And when you're thinking of the need to have people be able to function in society to meet the needs of employers, and technologies. I think that's a concern.
Rosemary Pennington
That was my question related to the issue of the needs of an aging workforce. And I know that's some of what you've studied, but it seems like there would be a lot of discussion, right when people lose their jobs and their older workers and say, you can go through and get retrained for a new job. But I wonder what your research has shown about what that transition is like for these older workers. Right? It seems like it's not as easy as showing up and getting retrained probably.
Phyllis Cummins
Probably not. And a lot of older adults have a fear of going back to the classroom. And some of it is because of poor educational experiences at younger ages, and really fear of going back to the classroom and a lot of our work has focused on community colleges. And community colleges tend to have students that are perhaps not as academically prepared as at Miami University. And another project I'm involved in, is looking at adult students at career and technical centers, which some might consider a lower tier than even a community college. But our focus is really on disadvantaged groups more so than because of the Community College and our focus on the lower skilled populations, slower literacy, numeracy, problem solving skills and those implications. But you know, during the pandemic I think one of the issues for older adults in the workforce and perhaps why they haven't gotten back is a lot of them. A lot of people stay in the workforce at older ages, just for the social aspects of work. And they lost that during the pandemic. So they were feeling more isolated and just the need to feel productive talk that might have some thoughts on that whole issue too, just based on some of your analysis of the hrs data.
Takashi Yamashita
So before I get to that COVID-19 thing, I kind of wanted to add one more thing to your earlier topic. So one of the fundamental issues for the low literacy among adults, in a way, are both social gerontologists, so we always look at things from the life course perspective, from life to death. If you just look at what's happening now, we might be missing some sort of important life history or socio historical context. So one of the things I wanted to point out is that having low adult literacy could impact your lifelong learning process. This is not just for workers or older adults, a specific segment of US populations, once you have the lower literacy skills, that's the fundamental skills to learn advanced skills, you know, update knowledge, especially in the, you know, technology rich, rapidly evolving societies, we need to constantly learn things. But once you are lacking the fundamental skills, you're going to have a hard time learning new things. So it is critical for us to develop solid foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy so that people can have more equal opportunity to learn new things. And these fundamental skills, you know, based on our research and the existing literature, we know that it's linked to every aspect of our lives, you know, we talked about health, but we it's linked to employment, it's linked to the Civic participations, it's linked to, you know, what kind of social network you might have. So these fundamental skills are, I will have to argue, as important as regular formal educational attainment and nowadays, so that's why that's one of the major reasons why we are interested in these fundamental skills.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking about the aging workforce with Taka Yamashita and Phyllis Cummins. I know talking to you, we're going to talk a little bit about the COVID-19 work. But I do want to backtrack really quickly, because you mentioned the fact that you and Phyllis are interested in sort of the life course, right, in your research. And I wonder, because studies sort of have to be snapshots in time, right? How do you, when you approach your research, ensure that you're taking into account the full life course that way you can kind of understand how things are, where they are, and what the implications might be down the road?
Takashi Yamashita
That's a great question. So one of the sort of simple but important applications of less life course perspective, exactly what we're doing. Because in most social science research in the US, we use formal educational attainment as a skill indicator, right. So among older adults, that happened like 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, we still rely on that piece of information to estimate people's skill sets. So what these basic skills can tell us is more updated, current foundational skills, that's also a good indicator for advanced skills and knowledge. So this is, it might be difficult to see some of you, but it is an application of life course perspective.
John Bailer
That's an interesting perspective, this idea of what was achieved historically versus what you continue to work to kind of improve. You know, as you two are talking about this, I found myself thinking okay, so what are some of the interventions? You know, it seems like you could think about intervening at different points in time. I mean, at one level from a life course perspective, it seems like early and often isn't as an answer about, you know, you want to you want to nurture kind of literacy, numeracy and problem solving, you know, from the earliest times of someone's education or young life, but then also this continuing education throughout the life life course. So how do you kind of formalize a recommendation, given the insights that you have from the work that you've done?
Phyllis Cummins
I like to use the Nordic countries as an example, because they have created what I think of as a learning society. They emphasize that for no, a couple of 100 years, they have really focused on providing opportunities for their their citizens to participate in adult learning activities to their learning societies, learning circles through their folk high schools, and the US really hasn't done that in terms of sort of ingraining in people the need to continue to learn over their entire life course. And I think it's increasingly important just because of technological changes in the US. And it's not just work technology, it's technology in the home, televisions have become very complicated and your iWatch your iPhone, is just to participate in society, you have to be some have some knowledge of technology in there. In reality, there are a few jobs today that don't involve some technology, whether it's logging in your work hours on the computer, or looking at your work schedule on a computer. So I think that just the whole idea of providing opportunities throughout the life course for affordable education.
Takashi Yamashita
Yeah, I think what the famous describe this sort of from the societal standpoint, in a foreign policy standpoint, what kind of things community and society can do to support lifelong learning, but what I would like to add is sort of changing the mindset or attitude toward, like learning across the life stages, you know, I usually just use this example of knowledge is like a muscle. So if you don't lose it, you lose it. So it's just like physical activities, you worked out 30 minutes yesterday, that's not enough, this is a lifelong process, we need to continue doing that to maintain what we have, and also improve what we have. This is also consistent with one of some of our work and the existing sort of major paradigm of the adult literacy field, we call that the practice engagement theory. So how we engage in literacy or a learning activity is linked to proficiency are our knowledge and skills. So use, if you use it more you can gain, you know the muscle or knowledge, but if you don't use it, we lose it. So I think what we want to do through our research is to change the public attitude toward learning. And we talked about the life course perspective, and then sort of conventional life course model is education, work and retirement. But these, these are no longer outdated, you know, we need to change this three part life course model, integrated across a birth to death. So we always learn, we always work, and we always engage in some type of leisure. Right. So by changing this perspective, we can change, we believe that we can change attitude toward learning so that people can engage in learning throughout their lives. That's sort of simple, but I think that can solve multiple issues that we are facing nowadays.
Rosemary Pennington
I do want to go back since Phyllis mentioned it earlier, and I don't want to lose the thread about the work you did around COVID. And maybe you guys could talk a little bit about what that research was, and maybe what you found.
Takashi Yamashita
So I think our work uses the sort of nationally representative data from Health and Retirement Study, the special module during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. So our work actually doesn't tell us what exactly Delta experienced compared to previous or, you know, the updated data, but what we described was their immediate response to their pandemic. And what we found was that actually, most of the older adults are relatively satisfied with their lives during the pandemic. But what data tells us is, they're more concerned about their own health, family's health and their future prospect, more uncertainty. We don't know exactly how their attitude or feelings toward their lives are different during the pandemic compared to other data points. But I think what we did is to sort of set the baseline data for the future research. So that was our contribution.
John Bailer
So what's what's going to be the follow up to this? I mean, so you say, if you're setting up this baseline, what are some of the research questions that are kind of burning in your mind right now, in terms of following this?
Takashi Yamashita
I think that would be interesting for us to know, if they experienced during the pandemic change their behaviors or attitudes toward their lives, but we can only examine that when newer data become available, it will also especially interested in if they change the way they communicate with other people, the way they learn new things, maybe, you know, because of the pandemic, they became more interested in online learning environment. Those are the kinds of interesting questions I have, but what are your feelings?
Phyllis Cummins
I agree and this is sort of a question for talk. Are they collecting new piak data now that might shed some light on that? Do you know when the next round will be available?
Takashi Yamashita
Right, I think PX is an action and ongoing data. So in the US states first collected the data in 2012. And they did the follow up in 2014. The second wave was 2017. And they are doing the new data collection in 2023. So the data won't be available until later 2024. But I think it'd be interesting to see, you know, this will capture the before and after pandemic. So I'd be interested to see how people's attitude or even basic skills are learning, lifelong learning behaviors changed before and after pandemic, you know.
Rosemary Pennington
I feel like there's been a fair amount of news stories about the concept of the aging workforce. Not always with a lot of depth. But if he's like, that's a story that comes back. And I wonder if, given the work you do if there's some story or something that you think we should be paying closer attention to, or that journalists should be following more closely, that you see sort of coming up in the data that just no one's really picked up on yet?
Phyllis Cummins
Well, it may be just by way of background, I got interested in the older, older workers, my dissertation focused on that I started the Ph. D. program in Miami in 2009. And that was sort of the end of the great recession. And older workers were especially impacted, not so much in terms of unemployment rates, but of long term unemployment. And many of them were forced to go back to school for retraining or a lot of manufacturing workers lost their jobs. And there was no way they were able to duplicate their salaries for like, someone working for GM or Ford, that was a union worker, and essentially used up their unemployment benefits. And then they became the long term unemployed and people wondered, well, why haven't you been working? So I think just the whole idea of older workers, understanding the need to continually upgrade their skills make themselves more marketable. We interviewed on another project, we interviewed older community college students, and there were a variety of reasons for them going back to school, maybe they had a life change if a woman had been married and got divorced. So she had the reskill. Maybe the children had gone home, they were empty nesters, they had the time to do it, maybe their employer wanted them to go back to school in order to be promoted. There are lots of reasons but I think it's because of worker shortages. Now in many areas, employers are, I think, more open to hiring older workers. And also because they can't always find someone with the skills that they need, they seem to be more willing to provide the training for workers.
Takashi Yamashita
I agree that's a really important issue. And other things I was thinking about is that just a general sort of like adult education and the learning participation by age groups. So what data are telling us is that as we age, we are less likely to participate in any sort of adult education and training. And that has a great implication for employment, especially among older workers. So data are clear that aging is negatively associated with participation in adult education and training. And then we just learned that, you know, engagement in skill use or you know, any sort of any form of learning, leading to updated skills and knowledge, and that leads to greater employment security and employment opportunities. But older adults are already at higher risk of unemployment and reemployment, but if they are not participating in adult education and training at this point, you know, the risk might become even higher. But I think, you know, most of the media may be picking on one particular issue, and we were missing all these connections. So it might be important for us to think about how we can support older populations in general and then particularly when they lose jobs or when they are looking for new employment. I think how we can support those older adults when they are particularly vulnerable from the employment standpoint might be an important issue that we are missing.
Phyllis Cummins
I think another benefit to adults of all ages participating in education and activities is not just to upgrade their skills, but it's to show potential employers that they can learn new skills. They just use signaling theory, some in our work just because it signals to the employer that yes, this person is trainable there. They can't learn new skills.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Taka and Phyllis, thank you so much for joining us today. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's departments of statistics and media journalism and film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcast, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program. Send your email to StatsandStories@Miami.Oh.edu Or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.