I have in this study examined, through qualitative interviews, how adults with foreign background that are pupils in adult education in Sweden, understand the concepts democracy and dictatorship. Their expressed understandings have been compared with their former life experiences as well as with the aim of the social studies to create a qualitative understanding of essential social concepts. My starting point is theories about the adult in leaning processes. It has been assumed that the adult interprets the world much through former life experiences. I have also relied on the idea that having a qualitative, more scientific, understanding of essential subjects is important for the adult as a member of society and participator in the on-going political debate. It should therefore be a central aim for educators in the social subjects within adult education to support a development of more qualified concept understandings among their pupils. In this study I have used the criterions of dr Roland Severin to define a qualified understanding of concepts. Such an understanding includes richness in meaning, structure, general description of cause and relation as well as the capacity to relate to different levels of abstraction. My conclusion is that the pupils in my study have very individual understandings of the concepts, especially the understandings of democracy. Their expressed understandings of dictatorship are in general less rich in meaning. I have found that their understandings are clearly influenced by former life experiences. In comparison to a qualitative understanding of concepts the pupils’ understandings both have strengths and weaknesses. The main strengths in their understandings lies in that they have structure and focus important meanings of the concepts. The pupils can also express their understandings in a concrete manner. The main weaknesses lay in that they lack sufficient meanings of the concepts to give them a exhaustive description. The pupils also tend to give more of concrete and less of general descriptions of the concepts. I have concluded that to support adult pupils in the development of more qualitative, and therefore more useful, social concepts educators should make use of the pupils’ collective experiences. By doing so more meanings of the essential concepts can be revealed and individual experiences can be connected to those of others to create generality in the pupils understandings.