The Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale (IEPS) is an instrument that measures students’ perceptions of interprofessional learning. It has shown satisfactory internal consistency for the total scale; however, problems regarding the psychometric properties of the subscales have resulted in several different versions of the instrument. The aim of this study is to further evaluate the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of IEPS using Rasch analysis. The Swedish translation of the 12-item, 3 subscale version of the IEPS was used in a student population ( n = 704) from eight healthcare programmes. The psychometric properties were evaluated using Rasch analysis based on five aspects: rating scale functioning, unidimensionality, reliability, targeting, and differential item functioning. The total scale showed satisfactory internal consistency. However, the scale was suboptimal regarding the response categories, where three response categories had to be combined into one to achieve a more optimal number of observations per category. Regarding the second subscale, Perceived need for cooperation, item 4 and particularly item 6 showed local dependency and disordered thresholds. To improve the evaluation of interprofessional education, future research should rephrase the response categories or minimize the number of response options. Additionally, the removal of item 6 and possibly item 4 from the second subscale may improve the psychometric properties of the scale.
Pachaly et al. (Sat,) studied this question.