Assessing Conceptual Knowledge of Oral Health in the Clinical Setting

Objectives: The objective of this project is to assess the public’s knowledge of oral health using existing surveys, and to evaluate the effectiveness of these surveys so that ultimately a brief survey can be created to be administered chair side.
Methods: A free response survey (KROHL) and a multiple choice survey (CHMOK) were used to assess the conceptual knowledge of dental caries and periodontal disease in 86 participants. The subsequent data collected from KROHL were scored based on a numerical scoring system created by the author. The scoring system was determined based on the relative level of knowledge that each individual demonstrated through KROHL. The scores of KROHL and CHMOK were added up to give the final summary of the participants’ knowledge grouped into one of the four categories – minimal, acceptable, modest, and good knowledge.
Results: 17.4% of the participants had minimal to no knowledge, 30.2% of the participants had acceptable knowledge, 40.7% of the participants had modest amount of knowledge, and only 11.6% of the participants had good amount of knowledge. Also, a whopping 91.9% did better on the multiple-choice questions than the free response. For periodontal disease, a little less but still a significant majority of 83.7% participants did better on the multiple-choice.
Conclusions: Most participants did significantly better on multiple choice than free response. This may be due to many reasons, such as lucky guesses and the general difficulty in recall compared to recognition. Hence, in the new survey that we aim to administer chair side, we would ideally want a brief questionnaire that includes multiple choice questions but those that allow for more than one answer choices to be correct, in order to decrease the chance of “lucky guesses” and to more accurately assess the patients’ level of knowledge.