DENTISTS RATINGS OF CHILD DENTAL-PATIENTS ANXIETY

This study investigates the extent to which dentists giving treatment are able to evaluate the (changes in) child patients' levels of fear, based on a comparison between direct behavior observations of a group of highly anxious children during sequential dental visits and video o bservations of the same group made by two independent evaluators using the measuring instrument described by VENHAM et nl. (9). A significan t difference was found between the fear scores given by the two dentis ts giving treatment and also between their fear scores and those by th e independent observers. Both the fear and behavior scores of the two dentists giving treatment, however, clearly correlated with the fear s cores of the observers. It is concluded that in this study the two den tists giving treatment were unable to award an unbiased fear score for each treatment given to a child but it was not possible to show that the bias was caused by experiences from previous sessions with the sam e child. After video training dentists giving treatment are capable of giving a picture of changes in children's fear levels during sequenti al dental visits.