Parental perceptions of children's oral health: The Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS)

Abstract

Background: Dental disease and treatment experience can negatively affect the oral health related quality of life (OHRQL) of preschool aged children and their caregivers. Currently no valid and reliable instrument is available to measure these negative influences in very young children. The objective of this research was to develop the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) to measure the OHRQL of preschool children and their families.

Dental caries and quality of life of preschool children: discriminant validity of the ECOHIS

“…In contrast to the comparison between a group without caries and another group with a number of teeth with caries more distant from zero. 1,5,16 In a probabilistic sample, a statistically significant result, but with a moderate effect size, was found in the comparison of children without caries and those with one to three teeth with caries, whereas a large effect size was found in the comparison of children without caries and those with four or more teeth with caries. 4 A moderate effect size was also found for a probabilistic sample that demonstrated a high degree of statistical significance with a cutoff point of one or more teeth with caries.…”

“…Table 1 displays the effect size findings for validation studies with non-probabilistic sampling. The effect sizes for the studies by Pahel et al 1 and Peker et al 5 ranged from small to moderate when using a cutoff of one to three teeth with caries and large when a cutoff of four or more teeth with caries was used. The effect size was large for the three remaining studies.…”

“…In the present study, caries was found to exert a real (as well as significant) influence on the OHRQoL of preschool children. The discriminant validity of the ECOHIS was confirmed based on the large effect size found for the majority of studies analyzed, 1,3,4,5,16,18,20,22 which means that this scale can be used to distinguish groups with different degrees of oral problems.…”

“…If most of the respondents answer "never" for questions on the ECOHIS, the groups studied will likely be similar with regard to the impact given by the mean score of the OHRQoL scale, which will obviously lead to a difference with a small magnitude. In the study by Pahel et al, 1 approximately half of the parents/caregivers reported no impact from caries on the quality of life of their children. The characteristics of dental caries in the sample of this study may explain the floor effect for the ECOHIS, as only 69 children had caries and 112 were caries free.…”

“…1,2,3,4,5,6,7 Assessing the discriminant validity of the ECOHIS in groups of children with and without caries, such studies have used traditional statistical methods involving the testing of the null hypothesis. However, some studies have demonstrated that this method is limited, as it may sometimes Declaration of Interests: The authors certify that they have no commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript.…”