Validação de um instrumento para triagem odontológica de pessoas com deficiência

Abstract

Dental care for people with disabilities generally requires attention at various levels of complexity, which imposes the need for rigorous integrated work by the health team. In order to contribute to the agility of dental care in the health network, a screening instrument was proposed for the evaluation and dental referral of people with disabilities (Plá et al., 2021). Therefore, this work aimed to validate and analyze the reliability of an instrument for dental screening of people with disabilities. This is a cross-sectional study of methodological development of the validation type, being developed from a quantitative approach. Content validity was verified by the percentage of agreement, and the Content Validation Index – CVI equation was also applied, construct validity was performed by hypothesis testing and stability analysis by the test-retest method. Internal consistency was evaluated using the calculation of Cronbach's alpha coefficient, corrected item-total correlation. Equivalence analysis was also performed using the Kappa coefficient. Statistical analysis of the data was performed using the Stata Software version 12.0. The stages of the validation process of the dental screening instrument for people with disabilities, developed by Plá et al. (2021), were based on research by Hoss and Caten (2010). In terms of content validity, the greatest need for suggested adjustments was in item 1d (non-collaborating patient) and in the replacement or re-elaboration of words or phrases with the aim of better understanding of the instrument by the target audience. The total content validation index was performed by a committee of experts, presenting an adequate value of 0.78 and the percentage of agreement was 100%. The construct analysis had the participation of 36 dentists answering the instrument and two experts of the gold standard performing the analyses. As a result of the reliability analysis, an adequate Cronbach's alpha of 0.80 and a strong level of inter-rater agreement, represented by a Kappa of 0.769, were obtained. Based on the results found throughout the methodological stages of the present work, it could be concluded that the dental screening instrument for people with disabilities (PLÁ et al., 2021) had validation and reliability analysis carried out successfully and can be applied with security. The instrument, a pioneer in the scientific literature, was considered reliable and of necessary application in primary health care.