Configuración de hábitat del jaguar ( Panthera onca )

As each student within college was assigned to just one tutor group which met weekly for an hour with their personal tutor, these meetings seemed to offer an equal opportunity of approaching every full-time 1 6 -2 0 year old student in college, without approaching anyone twice. Having obtained permission from the Principal, the Heads of Faculty and the Programme Managers to approach all the college tutors, letters were sent to over 50 tutors briefly explaining the research and asking for an opportunity to attend their tutor groups so that their students could be asked to participate. (See letter in Appendix 10.2.)

Eventually 26 separate tutor groups provided a total of 315 subjects aged 1 6 - 2 0 years. (Approximately ten mature students, who as members of the tutor groups filled in the questionnaires, were immediately excluded from the sample because of age.) In each tutor group, every student who attended on the day of my visit participated in the study by responding to the set of questionnaires. Thus there was no self-selection by the attending students. However some students rarely attended their tutorial. Perhaps some of them saw it as a waste of time while others were reluctant to attend because their tutor might reprimand them about late assignments or poor attendance. Thus it was possible that some of the least well-adjusted were missing from their tutorial session and so were not part of the sample. The attitude of the tutors to their students attending tutorials also varied quite considerably. Some tutors demanded and got almost 100% attendance. Others were very undemanding and seemed happy to have only about 50% attendance! Luckily I was not aware of this great variation when I was arranging my appointments so this did not affect my selection. The size of the subject groups responding to the questioimaires ranged from 7 to 17 students.

Two independent members of staff, one programme manager and the counselling co­ ordinator, both inspected the final list of tutor groups, when there was still the opportunity to make changes, and agreed that the sample included groups from all the programme areas in college and also represented the range of academic course levels. The subjects were studying on the following courses: GCSE, A-Level, engineering, child care, health and social care, catering, media, design & display, computing, business & finance, business administration, legal secretary and leisure & tourism. The level of the courses was not easy to measure because further education seemed to be functioning with a number of not quite parallel systems but the sample included courses at the GNVQ intermediate and advanced stages, NVQ levels 2 and 3, B Tec Firsts and BTec Nationals (first and second years) and GCSE and A-levels (first and second years.) The sample appeared to represent the breadth of the college curriculum and all academic levels.

In addition the tutor groups were representative of the groups to which the college counselling clients belong. During visits to two tutor groups, two students made it known to me quietly at the end of the session that they were attending college counselling with my colleagues. There were probably more such students who did not make themselves known. At the beginning of my research I went into two separate tutor groups and unexpectedly found my own clients. After that I was more careful to alert my clients if I was going to visit their tutor group. I did not specifically target groups where my clients were members but where the tutor did respond positively to my routine contact I did postpone my visiting session until the six counselling sessions germane to the next part of the research study had been completed so that the experimental paradigm was not affected. This affected three tutor groups.

SUBJECTS

The subjects were 315 Further Education students, (137 males, 175 females and 3 students who did not indicate gender.) They were aged from 16 to 20 years (Mean = 17.02; SD = 0.97) Their ethnic backgrounds were as follows: 123 (39%) UK, 102 (32%) Indian, 23 (7%) Pakistani, 16(5%) Caribbean, 12(4%) Black African, 6(3% )

East African, 6 (2%) European, 5 (2%) Other Asian, 3 (1%) Bangladeshi, 2 (1%) Chinese, 2(1% ) Irish, 2(1% ) Other Black, 4 (1%) Other White and 9 (3%) specified other. This is illustrated in Chart 10.3. Of this sample 67% were first year students, 26% were second years, 6% were in their third year and there was one student in his/her fourth and another in a fifth year at college. The number of GCSE passes gained with grades A - C ranged from 0 - 12, (Mean = 3.32, SD = 3.19) (See Chart 10.4.) The subjects were drawn from a wide range of academic and vocational F.E. courses.

The family circumstances of the sample were as follows. 98 % stated that their natural mothers were alive (3 subjects did not respond) and 93% that their natural fathers were alive (7 failing to respond.) Two students indicated that both parents had died. (The PAQ and IFFA for parents for these two subjects were excluded from the statistical analysis.) 68% responded that their natural mother and their natural father were married to each other and living together. For 16%, mother and father were divorced and living separately. 2% responded that mother and father had never married but were living together. 7 % indicated other situations, such as parents being divorced but living at the same address. (For the remaining 8% a parent was widowed.) The majority of the subjects were living at a parental home as follows: 64% were living with both parents, 23% were living with their mothers and 4% were living with their fathers. The remaining 9% were living with other family members, with friend(s) or alone.

Gauging the socio-economic status of the families from parents' occupation/job titles was more difficult. However they could be loosely categorized as follows: occupations requiring professional training, top managerial positions, own businesses (fathers 8%, mothers 14%), middle managers and skilled workers (fathers 28%, mothers 12%) semi-skilled workers (fathers 41%, mothers 31%) and unskilled workers (fathers 23%, mothers 34%.) In addition 22% of mothers were described as "housewife." Responses indicated that 79% of fathers were currently in paid employment (34 nil responses) as were 65% of mothers (12 nil responses.) Overall the responses indicated that the subjects' families represented a wide cross-section of

Chart 10.3