STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

identification of their completed inventories. Perhaps students were hesitant to provide both
inventory identification information and identification of the clinical site they were evaluating
for fear of loss of anonymity, particularly if there were a limited number of students at the
particular site.
Student lack of specificity in identification of clinical sites also presented a problem for
data analysis and interpretation. Although they were requested to identify the particular clinical
area or department within a facility to which they were assigned, 54 student respondents
identified their clinical learning sites with only a hospital name. This incomplete identification
of clinical sites resulted in the grouping of all inventories identified only with the facility name
into one site group for clinical site comparisons, potentially masking differences between distinct
(but unidentified) clinical sites within the facility. Five of the 25 clinical site groups used in the
comparative analysis included an unknown number of clinical sites within a particular hospital,
potentially impacting the ANOVA results, particularly for LMA and SMW institutions. This
incomplete clinical site identification may also have been a purposeful student act to protect
anonymity. It may be that the request for identification of inventories will need to be removed in
order to prompt students to accurately identify clinical sites. Perhaps in the future, separate
student populations should be used to gather test-retest reliability data and to conduct clinical site
comparisons, eliminating the need to gather student identification data for the site comparisons.
Student identification of their inventories would only be necessary for those students completing
evaluations of the same or different clinical sites over a period of time, for the purpose of
comparison of individual student scores.
Student data from one other demographic item were somewhat disconcerting to the
researcher. In response to the item addressing assignment of a student resource person, the
98