| Popis: |
Background The 14-item Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP) is the scale most frequently used to assess domains of oral health-related quality of life in patients undergoing oral treatments. The scale has shown validity, internal reliability, and temporal stability, but a formal analysis of item characteristics is still lacking.Methods We recruited adult participants undergoing prosthetic treatments from two dental clinical centers in Spain. We administered the scale once to a cross-sectional sample of patients (n = 398), and we did a retest with a follow-up subsample of patients (n = 153). We evaluated the underlying dimensional structure of the scale with Mokken analysis and its item characteristics with the Graded Response Model. We assessed the sensitivity to change in the follow-up sample with both the within-group raw mean change and the within-group standardized mean change.Results The Mokken analysis suggests a unidimensional structure of the scale with all items but one presenting adequate scalability. The overall scalability (H = 0.42) corresponds to a medium scale able to order participants along the latent trait of oral health-related quality of life. Most items present adequate scalability, discrimination, and information indexes. The exceptions are two items of the functional limitation domain that show outlying values from the rest. The sensitivity to change is adequate and shows an increasing trend with time since the intervention.Conclusions In this study, the 14-item Oral Health Impact Profile has shown appropriate psychometric characteristics at the item and overall scores level. It is unidimensional, allows to order patients on the construct of interest, and is sensitive to change. |
