a growing experience - Student Services - University of Melbourne

SAMPLEHEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTSMETHODA sample was drawn from international students with confirmed enrolments inundergraduate or postgraduate courses at The University of Melbourne in early March2005 5 . All international students, exclusive of Study Abroad students 6 , formed thepool (n=8,053) from which the sample was to be drawn. The pool of potentialrespondents was further refined by the decision to exclude any students who had notgiven the University an Australian flagged address 7 , because of the practicaldifficulties involved in mailing questionnaires to overseas addresses and receivingresponses within the established time-line.A pool of 6,828 international students was thus established. The countryrepresentation in this flagged address file was considered by Student ManagementSystems to be representative of the country representation in the permanent addressfile. Every third international student from an alphabetical listing of family nameswas selected from this pool into the sample, resulting in a sample size of 2,276.From this total sample of 2,276 an achieved sample of 979 responses was obtained.When the number of return-to-sender items (n=44) is taken into account, thisrepresents a response rate of 43.9 per cent.The achieved sample was checked for its comparability on major variables with thetotal population of international students enrolled at the University of Melbourne.Data concerning the age, gender, course type, faculty, and country of origin of theuniversity’s international student population were provided by Student ManagementSystems. As can be seen in Table 1, the achieved sample characteristics are closelyaligned with those of the university's international student population.Categorising the countries of origin of students was necessary because of the widerange of countries represented in the university population (n=115) and in theachieved sample (n=58). The system of categorisation is largely that used byDeumert et al. (2004) 8 . This allows independent representation of countries that havehigh student enrolments at the university, as well as grouped representation ofcountries with similar cultural characteristics but small enrolments at the university.Use of this system also allows for comparison of results between the present studyand the study of Deumert et al., (2004). The system of country categorisation used inthe present study is set out in Attachment 1.5 The researchers are very grateful for the expertise and the willing assistance of Mr Phillip Robilliard,Deputy Manager (Support), Student Management Systems, Student Administration, who undertook thistask.6 'Study Abroad'students were excluded from the sample because they are engaged in only a one ortwo semester program at The University of Melbourne for which they obtain credit towards a degree attheir home institution.7 A 'flagged address'is the one the University student administration uses for all mail communicationsto students during the academic year.8 The only difference is that Deumert et al. (2004) differentiate between Laos/Cambodia/Vietnam andOther South East Asia/Pacific countries. These two categories have been combined in this studybecause only Vietnam (and not Laos or Cambodia) was represented in the achieved sample.Rosenthal, Russell & Thomson, 2006 23