Fingeret (1983) spent 12 months with illiterate adults in their urban communities to "understand how they viewed their social relationships and the role of literacy in their social world" (p. 134), The results of her research did a great deal to dispel the myth of illiterate adults as dependent and deficient. She described most of the adults in her study as living within social networks characterized by interdependence, with each member contributing a range of skills and knowledge to the social network.

Horsman (1990) and Rockhill (1987) focused their research on the lives of illiterate women. Horsman talked with women in rural Nova Scotia and, in addition to presenting a description of their lives, she examined dominant discourses about literacy and ways women resisted these dominant discourses. One of the most notable aspects of the lives of the women in her (1990) study was the way their lives were organized (or disorganized) "in relation to the needs of others" (p. 25). These women lived their lives around the demands of their partners and children, and the organization of time, space and resources was outside of their control. They were frequently seen as responsible for all of the housework, making it difficult for them to have time to participate in literacy programs. They often moved locations in relation to their husband's work and rarely had access to a car, leaving them physically and socially isolated. For those on welfare, the welfare system organized their lives leaving them feeling controlled by the bureaucracy. Horsman (1990) also noted dependence in the lives of these women and how this dependence was related to violence,

the violence of women's isolation in the household and sometimes the actual physical violence of men's domination of women; the violence of drudgery of inadequately paid, hard, monotonous jobs; the violence of living on an inadequate welfare income and enduring the humiliation of receiving assistance. (p. 86)

For the women in Horsman's study, literacy represented a dream of going somewhere, of getting a job, of becoming independent, of change as reflected in the dominant discourses of literacy programs.