Development and preliminary validation of an ageism scale for dental students

This work presents the preliminary validation of a novel scale assessing ageism attitudes among dental students.

A 27-question scale was created based on existing ageism scales. The new ageism scale was applied to 144 dental students. Content validity was achieved by experts' consensus. Questions whose deletion increased the overall α, loading < 0.40, loading on more than one factors, or those unexpectedly grouped in another factor were thoroughly examined. Principal Component Analysis assessed internal structure of the measure.

The final ageism scale included four items in a single factor that explained 58.5% of the overall variance with substantially higher reliability than other factors. The Cronbach's α for this single four-items factor was 0.75.

This preliminary analysis of a novel ageism scale for dental professionals pointed to four items achieving high reliability, providing guidance for a future definitive validation study with a larger sample.