| Dentists' roles in assisting obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients to improve their quality of life have been recognized by the dental society. However, the barriers that prevent dentists from participating in dealing with OSA do exist. How to recognize those obstacles so as to improve the patient care should concern health educators and other health professionals. But before carrying on any appropriate evaluation of the factors that influence dentists' abilities to involve themselves in OSA care, a solid, valid, and reliable instrument or evaluation tool is needed. The primary purpose of the study was to develop an obstructive sleep apnea questionnaire for dentists, also labeled as OSAQ-D, that measures knowledge, opinion, education resources, physician cooperation, and clinical practice associated with OSA. The main focus of this early stage of OSAQ-D development was on pursuing instrument reliability and validity through a set of procedures.;The study involved three steps: scale development, pilot test, and final test. After the expert review of the item pool, a total of 78 items made up the pilot test instrument including five demographic, 22 knowledge, 15 opinion, 11 education resources, 10 physician cooperation, and 15 clinical practice questions. The pilot test samples were the third or fourth year dental school students and dentists of Shands Hospital, University of Florida. Nineteen dentists and 26 students returned the survey. Based on the item analysis and content review, items with bad item difficulty, low item discrimination and item consistency were removed from the instrument and a total of 70 questions were retained for the final test.;The final test samples included 450 dentists who were randomly selected from a list of 10,838 dentists with a Florida license, dental school students, and postgraduates of the University of Florida. A total of 112 dentists and 51 students and postgraduates returned the survey. Through the item and factor analysis, 52 questions were kept in the questionnaire. Examinations of the internal structure of the instrument and the relationship among knowledge, opinion, education resource, physician cooperation and clinical practice provided validity evidence. Reliabilities of five scales and subscales were also investigated. |
