Psychometric evaluation of the Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure: Swedish version

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) has been used in various studies to evaluate the educational environment. However, psychometric evaluations of the instrument seem sparse, for all known versions of the instrument. AIM: The aim was to psychometrically evaluate the Swedish version of the DREEM instrument. METHOD: A total of 503 students (undergraduate medicine), aged 19-46 years, in semesters 2, 6 and 10 were included in the study. Validity was evaluated through analysis of construct validity and reliability. RESULTS: The instrument had in general both acceptable validity and reliability. Due to a rather poor model fit in the confirmatory factor analysis, an explorative factor analysis was also employed which suggested a new five-factor solution for the instrument. CONCLUSIONS: The Swedish version of the DREEM instrument is shown to be valid and reliable, except for the factor structure. The new five-factor solution found in this study is not proven to be a superior measurement model compared with the original, but could be seen as an alternative model to the original, where the strong and weak areas are somewhat more easily identified.