Development and Psychometric evaluation of an instrument to measure staff nurses' perception of uncertainty in the hospital environment.

Perceived environmental uncertainty is an individual response to stimuli in the internal and/or external environment. The measurement of uncertainty in the health care environment is important in order to characterize the impact of this phenomenon on nursing practice. This study describes the development, pilot testing, and initial psychometric evaluation of the Perceived Environmental. Uncertainty in Hospitals Scale (PEU-H) in a sample of 95 hospital staff registered nurses. Principal components analysis of the PEU-H was conducted and indicated that the factor structure represented one factor that explained 37.3% of the variance. Internal consistency reliability using Cronbach's alpha was .83, which is acceptable for a scale in the early stages of development.