Abstract
BACKGROUND: Dental patient feedback can elicit concerns about practitioners' interpersonal skills, such as putting the patient at ease and communicating in a way that the patient understands the nature of the treatment plan offered. Several scales exist to determine the dental practice quality, such as the dental patient questionnaire (DPQ). This scale can detect the specialized relationship between patient and dentist, such as trust, satisfaction, and patient services. The current study was conducted to translate and psychometrically assess DPQ to be employed for the Iranian patients referring to dental clinics. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted on patients referring to the dentistry offices in Tehran in 2022. After translation and back translation of the original version of the patient-centered care questionnaire, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to measure the validity and reliability of the instrument. Validity consisted of face, content, and construct validity, and reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient and intraclass correlation coefficient. Data analysis was performed in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 22 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) and EQS (version 6.1). RESULTS: In this study, 228 respondents were recruited. The content validity results revealed that all items obtained the acceptable required content validity index and content validity ratio scores, and all 23 items were retained and used for later analysis. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index was calculated as 0.913. Measurement of the questionnaire validity by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) revealed three factors (trust, satisfaction, and service) with eigenvalues of >1. The confirmatory factor analysis model were confirmed. The model fit indices were in a good or at least an acceptable level in terms of all goodness of fit indexes. The reliability of the scale was confirmed with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient >0.6 for all factors and an intra-cluster correlation of 0.7. CONCLUSION: The results of the study showed that the Persian version of DPQ had appropriate validity, reliability, and psychometric properties. This tool can be used to measure trust, satisfaction, and quality of service of the patients referring to the dental offices in Iran.