Content Validation of Three Caries Management Satisfaction Instruments for Children, Parents and Dentists

Objectives: To validate the content of three instruments to asess dental care caries management satisfaction of child patients, parents, and dentists for their use in a multicenter RCT comparing in 6-7 years old patients the effectiveness of current International Caries Classification and Management System-ICCMS^TM, derived from ICDAS with adjusted Colombian Health System caries managements
Methods: Seven satisfaction related dimensions were identified after conceptual revision/comprehension: continuity, relevance, information, treatments efficacy, interpersonal relations, and satisfaction. Instruments were submitted to following three peer groups with study background information: four dentists, one pedagogue, two psychometers, to assess for each question: appropriateness, skill, coherence, relevance, syntax/semanthics, and if to preserve/not. For each peer group decision a co-authors’ conjunctive analysis was conducted, deciding which questions to preserve with/without modification and which to eliminate/add.
Results: Instruments were designed with 8 chidren’s, 10 parents’, and 18 dentists’ questions. After co-authors’ follow-up of dentist peer analyses, children instrument questions suffered sintaxis/wording modifications; parent instrument decreased to 9 and remaining questions suffered sintaxis/wording modifications; in the dentist questionnaire 6 questions were each divided into two, separating by management-scheme, 6 were eliminated (irrelevance/non appropriateness/repetition) and remaining questions suffered sintaxis/wording modifications. After pedagogic peer evaluation co-author follow-up, in children and parent instrument one question each suffered syntaxis/wording modifications. After psychometry peer evaluation co-author follow-up, one parentinstrument question was added and one moved from dimension; children instrument questions remained, with two moving from dimension; two dentist instrument questions were moved from dimension and two suffered syntaxis/wording modifications.
Conclusions: These content validated instruments should be validated in a pilot test-retest study with subjects with similar social-demographic characteristics to the multicenter RCT population and its reliability further assessed.