Abstract
The aim of the present study was to confirm the discriminant validity (obtained using traditional statistical methods) of the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) between preschool children with and without caries (mean score) through an evaluation of the effect size. A systematic search of electronic databases and a manual search were performed for studies published up to December 2015 involving the use of the ECOHIS for the evaluation of the impact of dental caries on oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) among preschool children. Two independent raters performed the selection of the studies and data extraction. Only papers published in English and Spanish were selected. No restrictions were imposed regarding the year of publication. Twelve studies were included, and the magnitude of standardized differences between the means of the "without caries" and "with caries" groups was calculated using Cohen's d. Most studies demonstrated a large magnitude in the difference between the groups evaluated. The estimate of the effect size confirmed the discriminant validity of the ECOHIS obtained through traditional statistics. Thus, the magnitude of the difference should be considered an important analytical tool for the confirmation of statistical findings regarding null hypotheses and demonstrates the clinical significance of these research results.
Highlights
Studies addressing oral health–related quality of life (OHRQoL) among preschool children using the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) have demonstrated that dental caries exert an impact mainly on the “symptoms”, “function” and “psychological” domains of the Child Impact portion of the scale as well as the “distress” domain of the Family Impact portion.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] Assessing the discriminant validity of the ECOHIS in groups of children with and without caries, such studies have used traditional statistical methods involving the testing of the null hypothesis
To confirm the discriminant validity of the ECOHIS obtained through traditional statistical methods, we evaluated the magnitude of the differences found in studies that have used this scale in groups of preschool children with and without dental caries
The validation studies included in the present review revealed discriminant validity, meaning that the total ECOHIS score is capable of distinguishing children with and without dental caries
Summary
Studies addressing oral health–related quality of life (OHRQoL) among preschool children using the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) have demonstrated that dental caries exert an impact mainly on the “symptoms”, “function” and “psychological” domains of the Child Impact portion of the scale as well as the “distress” domain of the Family Impact portion.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] Assessing the discriminant validity of the ECOHIS in groups of children with and without caries, such studies have used traditional statistical methods involving the testing of the null hypothesis. Some studies have demonstrated that this method is limited, as it may sometimes. Mask the presence of an effect.[8,9] In contrast, results from the analysis of the effect size are more precise and detailed, demonstrating the clinical significance of findings rather than merely focusing on statistical significance.[10] the analysis of the effect size is recommended to overcome the limitation of traditional hypothesis testing and can be used to compare the results obtained with the two methods.[10]
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