Validating an adapted questionnaire to determine perceptions of the clinical learning environment

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. IntroductionThe clinical learning environment is a key component of undergraduate medical students' curriculum. At our institution there was a need for an electronic instrument to evaluate student perceptions of their clinical learning environment.MethodologyThe Uppsala Instrument, which had previously been used to improve student perceptions of their clinical learning environments, was adapted for the context of a South African Academic Hospital by a panel of experts and then completed by a group of students. The results were then used to determine the validity and reliability of the instrument using principal component analysis.ResultsThe instrument proved to be highly reliable at measuring a single underlying component, 'perception of the clinical learning environment', and due to this, further determination of validity was limited. The findings were similar to those reached by other authors' studies of instruments evaluating the clinical learning environment in that most variance in responses were attributable to a single component.ConclusionThe fact that the instrument measures the clinical environment as a whole is useful, however it does not allow for deeper analysis of educational constructs within the clinical learning environment.