Background: Students' perceptions of the educational environment are an important construct in assessing and enhancing the quality of medical training programs. Reliable and valid measurement, however, can be problematic - especially as instruments developed and tested in one culture are translated for use in another.
Materials and method: This study sought to explore the psychometric properties of the Postgraduate Hospital Educational Environment Measure (PHEEM) for use in an Iranian hospital training setting. We translated the instrument into Persian and ensured its content validity by back translation and expert review prior to administering it to 127 residents of Urmia University of Medical Science.
Results: Overall internal consistency of the translated measure was good (a=0.94). Principal components analysis revealed five factors accounting for 52.8% of the variance.
Conclusion: The Persian version of the PHEEM appears to be a reliable and potentially valid instrument for use in Iranian medical schools and may find favor in evaluating the educational environments of residency programs nationwide.
Keywords: education environment; evaluation; postgraduate; psychometrics.