[Behavioral study of denture acceptance. Part 1 qualitative investigation of linguistic data and validity of coding...

The purpose of this study was to extract questionnaire items based on qualitative data from edentulous patients obtained by individual interview.

Forty-three patients (20 complete denture, 20 partial denture and three non-denture wearers) who had visited the dental hospital affiliated to Nihon University School of Dentistry at Matsudo voluntarily agreed to be interviewed about their denture use with ten questions structured by Triandis theory in an open-rended manner. Responses to interview were recorded by voice recorder and qualitatively analyzed into linguistic and coded items, i.e. fragmentation and editing of recorded data followed by linguistic coding. The coded items were then classified into one of the 4 domains of Triandis theory: intentions of their denture acceptance (I), social factor (SF), affect (A) and perceived consequences (PC).

The analysis of qualitative data, description, fragmentation and editing, accumulated 722 linguistic items. These were summarized into 72 codes, and classified into twelve I, nine SF, nine A and 42 PC.

The 72 coded items, which summarized the edentulous qualitative data including the 4 domains of Traindis theory, are considered useful as questionnaire items of behavioral investigation. Further large-scale studies using this questionnaire will be needed to clarify the reasons for denture acceptance.