Implementing and Assessing an Onsite Bilingual Educational Program for Hispanic Nursery Workers in Ohio

Technical training plays a significant role in job retention, advancement and increased remuneration potential. Bilingual content has been shown to improve Hispanics understanding of the subject matter and English skills. Family income is a major stabilization or destabilization force in families. We hypothesized that by providing a series of three bilingual training sessions to Hispanic nursery workers related to American culture/life skills (LS) and/or horticulture skills (HS) that could potentially lead to job advancement opportunities, we could improve workers' self-esteem, work motivation and family-relations. There were three main objectives to this study: 1) to assess the validity of a Spanish translated version of The Index of Family Relations (IFR) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE) to evaluate family adjustment problems and self-esteem, respectively, when administered to 97 adult Hispanic nursery employees in seven Ohio nurseries in 2005 and 2006; 2) to determine if nurseries differed in their training needs; and, 3) to define which type of training LS or HS (without LS) could improve family adjustment and/or self-esteem. Ninety seven (43% female, 57% male) of 150 employees originally contacted (35%), completed all three trainings and both pre-and post-testing, which were requirements for inclusion in the analyses. The 35% attrition rate (26% with males, 8% with females, averaged over 7 nurseries) indicates the difficulties in offering even a free, on-farm training program for Hispanic nursery employees. The results of the Chronbach's alpha for the IFR and RSE were 0.8 and 0.68 before and 0.86 and 0.7 after the training, respectively, indicating that the IFR and RSE (> 0.6 required validity) tests were valid and marginally valid, respectively, for this audience. Differences in RSE (p < 0.0078) and IFR (p < 0.0625) scores were detected using before and after scores across nurseries with non-opposing or identical distributions. The results indicate that self-esteem and to a lesser extent family relations can be improved by providing nursery need specific training and LS training having the greatest effect across nurseries. At one nursery IFR scores above 30 were observed with only LS lowering scores to non-critical. At some sites basic LS trainings seemed critical before successful HS training discharge. This study seems to identify problem employers and could be fundamental in improving employer/worker relationships within the nursery industry.