Reproducibility of an assessment scale of denture quality

Assessment of denture quality is important in prosthetic research. The aim of this investigation was to determine the intra- and interexaminer reliability of denture quality assessment. Three groups of patients with full maxillary and mandibular dentures and two dentists participated. The patients in group 1 (n = 195) were examined by the two dentists independently, in group 2 (n = 35) twice by one of the dentists and in group 3 (n = 20) twice by the other dentist. A denture quality scale was constructed containing nine variables. The internal consistency (coefficient alpha) of this scale was 0.60. The intra- and interexaminer reliability was between 0.59 and 0.86. For individual items of this scale these values were between 0.22 and 1.00.