Validity and reliability of patient satisfaction questionnaires in a dental school in Japan.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to construct questionnaires for the dental school setting from freely given patient answers with the aid of text mining, and to confirm the structure, reliability and validity of the questionnaires.


METHODS
Using these questionnaires, we carried out a survey of the satisfaction of patients treated at the Dental Hospital of the Tsurumi University School of Dental Medicine. A total of 3394 patients participated in the study. To confirm the reliability of inter-item correlations and construct validity, factor analysis was carried out, and items belonging to each factor and Cronbach's alpha coefficients were calculated.


RESULTS
Four factors were extracted and 64.0% of the variance was explained by these four factors. All correlation coefficients were >0.85. These four factors were: 'Treatment', 'Communication', 'Facilities' and 'Appearances'. From structural equation modelling, we determined that overall satisfaction was >0.75 and was statistically significant.


CONCLUSIONS
The questionnaires used in this study are useful for measuring patient satisfaction in the dental school hospital setting.
Imanaka
Masahiro
M
Department of Oral Radiology, Tsurumi University School of Dental Medicine, Tsurumi, Yokohama, Japan.
Nomura
Yoshiaki
Y
Tamaki
Yoh
Y
Akimoto
Naotake
N
Ishikawa
Chieko
C
Takase
Hideyo
H
Ishii
Hiroaki
H
Yamachika
Shigeo
S
Noda
Koji
K
Ide
Masamichi
M
Yamamoto
Ken
K
Kokubo
Yuji
Y
Seto
Kanichi
K
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002648:Child; D003142:Communication; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003740:Dental Clinics; D003812:Dentist-Patient Relations; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012575:Schools, Dental; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires