Two universities were purposively selected for the study. These universities are the oldest in Kenya and were considered to have been ” information-rich” for the purpose of this study. The universities were accessible to the researcher a fact which is important for easy collection of data. The population in these two universities were large enough to draw the respondents of this study.
The study targeted students from the school of medicine from the two universities. First year students were purposevly selected. These students were targeted because studies such as (Hilman, 2005) have shown that the greatest amount of student failure and drop-out occur in this particular year ( Chacha, 2015). In addition, first year students transits from secondary school where they have been under almost total supervision from parents and teachers and might find themselves enjoying a lot of freedom that might either help or hinder their academic performance and retention rate.
Moreover, first year students have to bear lengthy and demanding class sessions unlike what they were used to in secondary school. These students therefore could be major beneficiaries of counselling services in the universities.
A multi-stage sampling approach using different techniques was used. Convinience sampling, cluster sampling and Simple random sampling technique was used to select the experiment and the control groups from each of the two sampled universities. Due to various reasons including tight laboratory schedules, academic field trips, desire not to disrupt learning, among others convinience sampling was used to select the students
that were available in each university. From each university 52 first year students were conviniently
selected. The groups were then clustered in gender. Holdcroft (2007) suggests that findings from an experimental study might largely be invalid because they might have gender bias implications where one gender is studied more than the other and results are generalized and applied to both genders. Therefore, balancing of the genders in this study was intended to eradicate biases when generalizing the findings from the study sample on the population. Random sampling was then used to asign the participants in experimental and control group.
According to Krejcie and Morgan’s sample size determinant table (Krejcie, & Morgan, 1970) (Appendix A5), 104 (103 on the calibrated table) students were adequate for the sample size from an accessible population of 140. Apart from