Investigating the role of literacy in quality of life and economic literacy of prisoners

The structure of quality of life is considered as an analytical, political and key element in the policy-making and review of public sector policies and it is referred to as the social development index. On the other hand, economic literacy is considered as one of the effective factors in economic development. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of literacy in quality of life and economic literacy of prisoners.

The present research was performed in comparative method. The statistical population included all literate and illiterate parents of Birjand Central Prison Literacy Training Complex in the first six months of 2018, 120 people from the mentioned population were selected by available sampling method. The research instruments included a standard questionnaire for the World Health Organization’s Short Quality of Life Form (2002) and a researcher-made questionnaire on economic literacy. Two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the data by SPSS software version 19.

According to the results, out of 120 samples, 60 were illiterate (30 women and 30 men) and 60 were literate in prison (30 women and 30 men). The results showed that the mean and standard deviation of quality of life in the group of literate parents and illiterate parents were (78.10 ± 19.520 and 67.05 ± 16.898) respectively. Moreover, the mean and standard deviation of economic literacy in the group of literate parents and illiterate parents (60.97 ± 13.811 and 50.53 ± 12.883). The results also showed that there was a significant difference between the quality of life and economic literacy of literate parents and illiterate parents (P <0.004). In other words, the quality of life and economic literacy of literate parents were more literate than illiterate parents.

The research findings showed that there is a relationship between the level of literacy and the quality of life and economic literacy. Therefore, the results of the research require more attention from education officials and literacy officials.