What brings adults back to evening education? Understanding participation through a Revised Chain-of-Response model

Adult participation in education is not a single, self-explanatory act. It is better understood as a cumulative process shaped by self-belief, prior educational experience, institutional conditions, practical feasibility, and the meanings adults attach to a specific educational route. This article presents the Revised Chain-of-Response (RCOR), an empirically grounded revision of Cross’s (Citation1981) Chain-of-Response developed through two quantitative studies in Greek Evening General Lyceums: a nationwide survey in 2014–2015 (n = 1,821) and an island-region survey in 2021–2022 (n = 268). The article is a conceptual synthesis of those studies rather than a new causal test of the model. Its distinctive empirical vantage point is realised participation: both datasets comprise adults who had already enrolled in formal evening secondary education. Across the studies, self-evaluation, attitudes towards education, educational perspective, expected change, opportunities, and information remain salient, while the evidence supports a more differentiated reading of goals and expectations and a more cautious treatment of barriers. In Study B, completion-oriented educational goals were strongly endorsed, whereas family-finance expectations were present but more moderate; projected changes were more salient than classical transition triggers, and information from other participants was more strongly endorsed than most formal information sources. RCOR retains COR’s seven links but revises their internal specification and treats participation as cumulative and recursive rather than as a fixed linear sequence. It is proposed as a context-bound heuristic for formal credential-recovery settings, not as a universal law of adult participation.