Making a Long Questionnaire Short: Alternatives to Reducing the Items on the Veterans Health Administration Learners' Perceptions Survey

• Activity Number: 313
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Stephen J. Dienstfrey*+ and Evert Milander and Gianna Dusch
• Companies: Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas, Inc. and Department of Veterans Affairs and Schulman, Roinca, & Bucuvalas, Inc.
• Keywords: customer satisfaction ; health care clinical training ; questionnaire construction

Abstract

The Office of Academic Affiliations of the Veterans Health Administration began work on the Learners' Perception Survey (LPS) in 1999. The initial survey was developed after an extensive literature review and 15 focus groups with faculty and trainees in a variety of healthcare professions. The resulting was a questionnaire asked trainee's satisfaction on 50 specific elements from four domains: Clinical Faculty/Preceptors, Learning Environment, Working Environment and Physical Environment. In the 2003 survey, a fifth domain--Personal Experience--was added, resulting in a questionnaire that had 65 specific elements. There was concern that the growing length of the questionnaire could have a negative impact on the response rate. This paper compares the results of reducing the number of elements by using a domain satisfaction base and an overall satisfaction base for selecting elements to be included in the short form version of the basic LPS.