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Occupation choices of adults with and without symptoms of dyslexia
Author(s) -
Taylor Kathleen E.,
Walter Janet
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
dyslexia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.694
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1099-0909
pISSN - 1076-9242
DOI - 10.1002/dys.239
Subject(s) - dyslexia , psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , reading (process) , linguistics , philosophy
People with the learning disability developmental dyslexia characteristically have difficulties in processing written language. There is some evidence that they may also have talents in other areas such as visuospatial processing. This pattern of strengths and weaknesses may predispose people who have dyslexia towards adopting certain occupations and away from others. Although there is literature on career choice in learning disabled adults in general, relatively little work has been done specifically for dyslexia. We therefore compared the occupations of adults with and without symptoms of developmental dyslexia. Results were analysed using non‐parametric statistics and are illustrated with a case study. We found significant differences in the distribution of our samples. Adults with symptoms of dyslexia were much less likely than adults not reporting such symptoms to be involved in professions such as science/computing, management and finance. They were more likely to be involved in people‐oriented professions such as nursing or sales. While preliminary, these results suggest that people with dyslexia may indeed show significantly different patterns of occupation choice. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.