Nurses undertaking postgraduate nursing degrees are an important contributor to nursing research. Not only are supervised research theses undertaken in clinical, educational and managerial areas but also increasingly a number of the findings are published in peer-reviewed journals. The literature identifies a number of outcomes that are perceived as being developed during and following the completion of a thesis, these include: the ability to work independently and critically, the use of advanced methodological designs and the ability of the student to apply theory to their practice through the dissertation process. However, there is little evidence that these outcomes are being achieved by students following completion of a research component of a master's programme. Little is known about the effectiveness, quality or outcomes of the research supervision that postgraduate students' receive as part of their higher education process. Therefore, there is a need to identify and utilise a survey instrument that can reliably evaluate the research experience of postgraduate nursing students. An instrument identified in the literature evaluate the research experience of PhD and postgraduate students is the Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (PREQ) The PREQ was initially developed to allow higher education institutions benchmark their performance in relation to research supervision with other third-level institutes. However, the results from the PREQ also allow for an evaluation of the student's experience of research and research supervision at individual and programme level. The overall aim being to provide a global picture of postgraduate students' experience of undertaking research. The PREQ consists of six-subscales which consist of 28 Likert scale items. The six subscales are: Supervision (6 items), Intellectual Climate (5 items), Clarity (clear goals and expectations) (3 items), Infrastructure (5 items), Skills Development (5 items) and Thesis Examination Process (3 items) and one further Overall Satisfaction item. There are no published reports of reliability or validity testing of the PREQ with masters in nursing students, therefore further psychometric testing of the instrument was undertaken. This paper describes the process of testing that was undertaken with the PREQ to determine the reliability and validity of the instrument as an outcome measure of the research experience of master's in nursing students. Testing included item response theory, and classical test statistics (Cronbach's alpha and inter-item correlations). Exploratory Factor Analysis was also used to validate the subscales in the instrument. It was identified that the PREQ is a reliable and valid indicator of the research experience of masters in nursing students and is a useful adjunct in the evaluation of the experience of postgraduate students.