Development and Validation of the French Version of the Orofacial Esthetic Scale

The aims of this study were to develop a French version of the Orofacial Esthetic Scale (OES) and to investigate its psychometric properties among French-speaking dental patients.

The OES is an eight-item instrument initially developed to assess self-reported orofacial esthetics in patients with prosthodontic concerns. The first seven items refer to direct esthetic impact and give a summary score, and the remaining item is a global assessment item. The original English version of the OES questionnaire was translated and cross-culturally adapted to develop a French version (OES-F). The reliability (internal consistency and test-retest reliability) and validity (convergent and discriminative) of the OES-F were then tested in a sample of 140 patients awaiting dental treatment.

Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the OES-F ranged from 0.885 to 0.913. The corrected item-total correlation coefficients ranged from 0.523 to 0.872. Intraclass correlation coefficient values were 0.94 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.89 to 0.97) for the summary score and ranged between 0.85 (95% CI 0.73 to 0.92) and 0.90 (95% CI 0.81 to 0.94) for the items. OES-F summary scores assessed by patients were significantly correlated with experts' ratings (r = 0.51; P < .05). OES-F summary scores discriminated patients with esthetic concerns from those without esthetic concerns (P < .05).

The OES-F questionnaire showed excellent psychometric properties and may be a suitable scale for assessing orofacial esthetics among French patients awaiting dental treatment.