Beliefs about professional ethics, dentist–patient communication, control and trust among fearful dental patients: the factor structure of the revised dental beliefs survey

Abstract

The revised version of the Dental Beliefs Survey (DBS‐R), intended to measure three dimensions of the patient–dentist relationship as perceived by the patient, namely Ethics, Communication and Control, was tested in a confirmatory factor analysis. Five different models for the internal structure of the questionnaire were tested. The final model, a 5‐factor solution, basically including the 3 assumed dimensions as well as the re‐introduced dimension Trust covered in the first version of the DBS plus a global factor including all items, yielded an acceptable fit. This model also omits 4 items from DBS‐R, i.e. items 3, 11, 18, and 28. The reduced DBS‐R is recommended for clinical use when assessing the patient's perception of the relationship to the dentist, including both trust and ethical behavior.