Designing the questionnaire to evaluate mother’s knowledge, attitude, and practice about oral health

Parental knowledge about oral health is the first step in oral health education interventions. It is necessary to have a standard questionnaire. The purpose of this study was to design a standard questionnaire to evaluate parents' knowledge, attitude and practice.

In this study, the expected areas were identified by pediatric dental and oral health professionals. Then the questions related to each area were identified. After determining the face validity, a questionnaire was designed and expert opinions of pediatric dentists (n = 10) and subjects (n = 20 mothers) were used. To determine the content validity, the questionnaires were reviewed by experts and their transparency, simplicity, relevance and suitability were determined. The final questionnaire was completed by 47 mothers and Cronbach's alpha coefficient of reliability of the tool. The agreement and the amount of kappa statistic for each question were determined and reported.

The questionnaire of mothers’ knowledge, attitude and practice has questions with sufficient content validity. The final questionnaire has 35 questions including 11 knowledge questions, 9 attitude questions, 6 practice questions. It also contains 9 questions about demographic characteristics. Also, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.813 in assessing the mothers' reliability of the questionnaire.

Given the use of standard techniques for designing research tools and their results on validity and reliability indices, it seemed that this designed questionnaire could be used as a valid and reliable tool for determining parents' knowledge, attitude and practice in oral health