Development of a questionnaire to assess dentists’ knowledge, opinion, education resources, physician cooperation, and clinical practice regarding obstructive sleep apnea (OSAQ-D)

Abstract

This report describes the construction of a questionnaire to assess dentists' knowledge, opinion, education resources, clinical practice, and physician cooperation regarding obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) based on the PRECEDE-PROCEED model. The scale development included such steps as generating an item pool, expert review of initial item pool, pilot test, and final test. After the expert review, a total of 78 items made up the pilot test instrument including five demographic (age, year graduated from dental school, gender, years in practice dentistry, and membership of the Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine), 22 knowledge, 15 opinion, 11 education resources, 10 physician cooperation, and 15 clinical practice questions. The pilot test samples were third or fourth year dental school students and dentists from the University of Florida. Nineteen dentists and 26 students returned the survey. Based on the results of item analysis and content review, a total of 70 questions were remained for the final test. The final questionnaire was mailed to 450 dentists who were randomly selected from a list of 10,838 dentists with a Florida license and also delivered to 65 dental school students and postgraduates of the University of Florida. A total of 163 participants including 112 dentists and 51 students and postgraduates responded. The average age was 42.87 years, and most of them are males (77.8%). Only one dentist was a current member of the Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine. The item analysis was performed for five scales. 8 items with poor item difficulty, lower item discrimination, or having big effect on the item consistency were removed from the instrument, and 62 questions were kept for the further evaluation. The reliability coefficient alpha of knowledge, opinion, education resources, physician cooperation, and clinical practice scales was 0.77, 0.86, 0.67, 0.75, and 0.86, respectively. According to the standard from DeVellis (Scale development: theory and applications, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2003), they were acceptable, or respectable, or even very good.