Perception Regarding Pediatric Dentist's Appearance and Factors Influencing the Child's Responses

To develop, validate, and apply an instrument for assessing the children's perception regarding pediatric dentist's appearance, based upon the influence of age, gender, previous dental experience, and anxiety.

Images and a nine-item questionnaire were developed. The acceptability, convergent-construct validity, and reliability based on reproducibility and internal consistency were evaluated. The validated instrument was applied in a cross-sectional study, with children (n=120) aged 7-12 years asked to evaluate images of pediatric dentists wearing different dental attire (A:all-white (control); B:printed coat and cap, colorful face mask; C:printed coat, cap and face mask; and D:white coat and cap, printed face mask). Children's age, gender, and previous dental experiences were collected with the guardians. The Children's Fear Survey Schedule-Dental Subscale assessed children's anxiety. Descriptive and inferential statistics were carried out (p<0.05).

The instrument showed excellent acceptability, construct validity with moderate and strong correlations (>0.40), satisfactory reproducibility (ICC >0.70), and internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficient >0.70). Considering only the attire, the children's perceptions were more positive with the use of attire C and D (p<0.05). Intergroup analysis of all the variables did not identify a statistically significant difference (p>0.05). In the intragroup analysis, compared to attire A: younger children have higher perception scores to attire D; girls, children with previous experience and without anxiety favored attire C and D; and children without previous experience showed no difference in comparison to A but did between B and C (p<0.05).

The C and D attires promoted a more positive perception of the appearance of a pediatric dentist when compared to A; however, age, gender, previous dental experience, and anxiety did not influence the perception scores.