Development of an Instrument to Measure the Climate of Professionalism in a Clinical Teaching Environment

BACKGROUND: This report describes an instrument that measures professionalism in clinical environments, reports its psychometric properties, and discusses its potential uses. METHOD: The survey asked students (n = 371) to report the frequency of peers', residents', and faculty's professionalism behaviors and faculty's professionalism teaching, and it asked faculty (n = 28) to self-assess their teaching of professionalism. The authors investigated the instrument's reliability, convergent validity, and ability to detect differences between groups. RESULTS: Coefficient alphas were .75 or higher. Correlations showed positive relationships between students' perceptions of professionalism behaviors and faculty's professionalism teaching. t-tests indicated that preclinical students rated faculty's professionalism behaviors higher than did clinical students, and students rated faculty's professionalism teaching higher than the faculty rated themselves. CONCLUSIONS: The psychometrics of the instrument's scores are sound. The instrument has potential to meet the Liaison Committee on Medical Education's mandate to measure professional standards within learning environments and to track effects of interventions promoting the professionalism of learners and faculty.