Sample and Sampling techniques
The sample size was calculated to be 196 by using the Fisher’s formula (Vaughan and Morrow, 1989); 15% as prevalence rate of adolescent psychological distress from a previous study (Taiwo, 2011) and degree of accuracy of 5%. However, the sample size was rounded up to 200 to improve the power of the study. Sampling was done in stages: the first stage was the selection of Egor LGA by simple random sampling (balloting). The second stage of sampling was carried out by stratifying the schools into two groups; public (government owned) and private schools. Five schools were randomly selected of which three were public and the rest were private. Selection of schools were restricted to only mixed gender schools to make comparison of findings easier since almost all the private schools in Benin-city are mixed schools. In the final stage, 40 students were drawn from the five selected schools to form a total of 200 which participated in the study. They were systemically drawn to include pupils in the senior secondary (SS) classes I and II while the SS III were excluded because they were not available at the time of study due to the final year examination.