Development and Validation of the Scan of Postgraduate Educational Environment Domains (SPEED): A Brief Instrument to Assess the Educational Environment in Postgraduate Medical Education

Introduction: Current instruments to evaluate the postgraduate medical educational environment lack theoretical frameworks and are relatively long, which may reduce response rates. We aimed to develop and validate a brief instrument that, based on a solid theoretical framework for educational environments, solicits resident feedback to screen the postgraduate medical educational environment quality. Methods: Stepwise, we developed a screening instrument, using existing instruments to assess educational environment quality and adopting a theoretical framework that defines three educational environment domains: content, atmosphere and organization. First, items from relevant existing instruments were collected and, after deleting duplicates and items not specifically addressing educational environment, grouped into the three domains. In a Delphi procedure, the item list was reduced to a set of items considered most important and comprehensively covering the three domains. These items were triangulated against the results of semi-structured interviews with 26 residents from three teaching hospitals to achieve face validity. This draft version of the Scan of Postgraduate Educational Environment Domains (SPEED) was administered to residents in a general and university hospital and further reduced and validated based on the data collected. Results: Two hundred twenty-three residents completed the 43-item draft SPEED. We used half of the dataset for item reduction, and the other half for validating the resulting SPEED (15 items, 5 per domain). Internal consistencies were high. Correlations between domain scores in the draft and brief versions of SPEED were high (>0.85) and highly significant (p