Standardisation of multiple-choice questionnaire for evaluating medical officers' training in psychiatry

This study reports the standardisation of a multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ) for evaluating the training of primary care physicians in psychiatry. An item pool of 104 multiple-choice questions of the 'single best response' type was written. This item pool along with an 'MCQ assessment sheet' was mailed to 90 psychiatrists with a request to evaluate the questionnaire. Twenty five psychiatrists responded to the enquiry, of which 22 gave their detailed comments regarding the MCQ. Based on the responses that were received, 14 items were discarded, 77 items were modified and 13 items accepted without any modification. The final pool of 90 items was split into two comparable sets, one for pre-training assessment and the other for post-training assessment. The questionnaire was administered to a group of 32 medical officers and was found to be sensitive in detecting gains in knowledge following training.