Judging severity of dental problems in relation to other individual problems

The methods of paired comparisons and direct ranking were applied to the study of the relative severity of three dental problems and nine problems concerning general health, material affairs, and psychologic well-being. Subjects (n = 51) were men and women, psychology freshmen. Direct ranking and paired comparison resulted in highly comparable overall orderings of the 12 problems. It appeared that all subjects were consistent in their comparative pairwise choices. Agreement between judges was statistically significant also, but the results indicated large individual differences. Subjects judge the severity of the three dental problems to be less than the severity of the other problems. There were no significant differences between the judged severity of the three dental problems among themselves. In the discussion several possibilities for future research are mentioned.