STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

also may have averted a higher incidence of items left blank by respondents. There was a very
low incidence of missing data for the scaled inventory items—only 17 missing responses to the
forced-choice items were found for the 319 completed end of semester inventories. It should be
of benefit to continue to provide the “can’t answer” response option in instrument revisions, at
least until trends can be determined for items having frequent responses of “can’t answer” and
for items left blank. Eventually this option might be changed to “no opportunity to experience”
or “not applicable”
A few issues of concern were noted in review of the data resulting from the demographic
items within the inventory. Student identification of their completed inventories was missing in
35 cases. The missing data may have been the result of student fear for loss of anonymity,
particularly when there were few students evaluating a particular clinical site. The method of
inventory identification (first two letters of mother’s first name and last two digits of the
student’s social security number) was chosen in order to protect student anonymity, so a lower
incidence of missing data was expected. However, the only analysis affected by missing
identification was the correlation of individual student responses to the pretest and end of
semester inventories. This issue may continue to be a problem if further instrument testing
involves comparison of student responses at different points in time.
Missing data and incomplete responses were also a problem for the clinical site
identification item. Twenty percent of the end of semester inventories and seventeen percent of
the pretest inventories were missing clinical site identification. This resulted in the exclusion of
these inventories from the comparative analysis of scale scores according to clinical sites. It was
interesting to note that in the analysis of the original SECEE inventory there was not a problem
with missing clinical site identification. However, the original instrument did not request student
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