Introduction Research Design Study Area

CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY

3.1 Introduction

This chapter will present information on the research design, study area, target population, sampling and sample size, data collection, data analysis and presentation.

3.2 Research Design

A research design refers to the plan of carrying out a research. It should have internal validity if with the design the treatment can bring about the changes in the dependent variable and external validity generalisability of the result to the other groupssettings and population. A research design ensures that the evidence obtained enables us to answer the initial question as unambiguously as possible and the design relies upon the objectives of the study which are in turn encapsulated within the research questions. This study used a descriptive research design that described the needs of students pursuing Tour guide ESP course. A descriptive research design helps in providing answers to the questions who, where, what, when and how. It is in fact used to obtain information concerning the current status of the phenomena and to describe what exists. According to Glass and Hopkins 1984, descriptive research design involves gathering data that describe events and then organises, tabulates, depicts and describes the data collection. Applied to the present study, the design helped in describing the needs of students pursuing a Tour Guide course which was the research problem of the study. Descriptive research design can be either qualitative or quantitative and the present study adopted both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The two approaches supplement each other in that the qualitative approach provides the in-depth explanations while quantitative approach provides the hard data needed to meet the objectives and test hypotheses Mugenda Mugenda,

2003, p.156.

3.3 Study Area

The area of study was Nairobi County and though there are forty seven counties in the country, the researcher found the county most suitable for the study because it is cosmopolitan Ochieng, 2003, had the biggest number of registered colleges offering Tourism courses as per the Ministry of Higher Education Science and Technology. The county also had firms that provided tour guiding services.

3.4 Population