Aim
To elaborate and validate an instrument for Brazilian Portuguese speakers, to assess dentists’ knowledge about care of patients with diabetes mellitus (Dental-Diabetes).
Methods
Methodological study comprising four stages: a) Elaboration of instrument; b) Content validation (computing Content Validity Index - CVI) based on Expert Committee assessment; c) Pre-test with 30 dentists, followed by assessment of suggestions by Expert Committee; d) Psychometric validation through instrument application in a sample of 127 dentists by means of the web tool e-Surv. Cronbach’s alpha and intraclass correlation coefficients were used to evaluate, respectively, internal consistency and reproducibility.
Results
The final version of the instrument consists of 22 questions (7 on sociodemographic data and 15 querying dentists’ knowledge) and those submitted for validation attained a CVI of 0.95 [95% CI 0.916-0,981], showing satisfactory internal consistency, with 0.794 Cronbach’s alpha [95% CI 0.741-0.842] and an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.799 [95% CI: 0.746-0.846] between the test and retest scores.
Conclusions
Dental-Diabetes is a comprehensive instrument, culturally adequate and validated to assess dentists’ knowledge about care of patients with diabetes.
Diabetes mellitus; Dentists; Knowledge; Validation studies as topic