Milli mála - 2023, Blaðsíða 119
Milli mála 15/2/2023 119
(Statistics Iceland, 2019). After excluding participants who did not
indicate their age or gender, there were 0.5% (N=10) over 66 years
old (5 female), 30% (N=625) between 41 and 66 years old (407
female), 61% (N=1284) between 26 and 40 years old (854 female),
and 13% (N=274) between 18 and 25 years old (193 female). Because
of the small size of the oldest group, for the purpose of further
analysis, we merged the two oldest groups.
We further excluded participants who have never lived elsewhere
than in Iceland, i.e. who were not immigrants (N=13), and partici-
pants who did not indicate how long they had lived in Iceland (N=6),
their income (N=62), age (N=12), gender (N=8), origin (N=7), and
proficiency in Icelandic (N=19).
Finally, we needed to exclude participants who did not provide a
meaningful answer to the question about how many Icelandic langu-
age courses they had taken. There were several participants who obvi-
ously misunderstood this question and seemed to indicate the num-
ber of individual lectures attended, not courses as the number of
courses indicated was considerable higher than the number of courses
usually offered (4–5). We decided to exclude all participants who re-
ported taking more than six courses. This led to the exclusion of an
additional 165 respondents, resulting in a sample of 1934 participants
for further analysis. To be included in our assessment of satisfaction
with language courses, participants had to have taken at least one
language course and answered the question about satisfaction. There
were 357 participants who indicated that they had not taken a course,
and 54 participants who did not answer the question about satisfac-
tion. This number (411) is a bit lower than the number of participants
we included in the category “0 courses” for the variable numbers of
courses taken (N=435). The discrepancy might be due to some people
starting a course but never finishing it, and therefore indicating the
number of courses as 0.
5.2 Sample characteristics
Most participants (62%, N=1215) were female, between 26 and 40
years old (57%, N=1111), and came from Central and Eastern Europe
(66%, N=1287). Because so few participants indicated being from
LARA W. HOFFMANN, YVONNE HÖLLER, MARKUS MECKL