[Odontologic psychometry: a scale for measuring fear of dentistry (or dentists)]

A sample of 157 elementary school children, 94 boys and 63 girls aged 10-13, answered two questionnaires related to dental anxiety: Corah's Dental Anxiety Scale (CDAS) and a scale constructed for the investigation, the Dental Tension Scale (DTS), in which the first of three questions is "Are you afraid of going to the dentist?" (DTS1). The mean on CDAS (M = 8.61, SD = 2.71) is in good accordance with earlier published results, and has significant moderate to good correlation with DTS (r = 0.73, p less than 0.01) and DTS1) (r = 0.74, p less than 0.01), in particular for the girls (r = 0.75 and r = 0.87 respectively). There are significant (p less than 0.01) intercorrelations for pairs of items on CDAS and DTS, varying form r = 0.34 to r = 0.66. The CDAS results are for the time being the only available norms in Norway, and further studies are needed to establish norms for different age groups and on a national basis. The single question "Are you afraid of going to the dentist?" appears to be promising as a valid measure of the overall self-reported dental anxiety, which is in support of some earlier findings. The results in the present article are a first step in search of reliable and valid predictors for the development of debilitating dental anxiety in children.