OPINIONS OF DIFFERENT SUBGROUPS OF DENTISTS AND PATIENTS ABOUT THE IDEAL DENTIST AND THE IDEAL PATIENT

The aim was to study whether subgroups of lay people and dentists diff er in their opinions about the ideal dentist and the ideal patient. Th is was done by analyzing further a data set containing responses on si ngle statements regarding different aspects of dentist-patient relatio nship that have been reported previously. A questionnaire containing 1 24 five-class Likert scale statements and questions about the backgrou nd of the respondents was sent in November 1988 to a representative sa mple of lay people and to all dentists in Kuopio and North Karelia Pro vinces in Finland. To extract areas of interdependence for both dentis ts and patients, factor analyses were applied to the data and factor s cores were calculated for further analyses. Differences in the opinion s were studied between dentists and patients as well as among subgroup s of patients and dentists. The power of the selected factors in discr iminating between dentists and patients, and different subgroups of de ntists and patients was evaluated by means of logistic regression anal yses. The expectations of dentists and patients were similar about the ideal patient. About the ideal dentist, dentists and patients agreed only on one of the five factors, i.e. communicativeness and informativ eness. Differences, especially in the opinions about the ideal patient , were found between following subgroups of patients: non-regular and regular attenders, males and females, old and young, patients with low and high education and different occupational status; and between pri vate practitioners and community dentists.