Dual institution validation of an ageism scale for dental students

Purpose/aim Ageism negatively affects health care. This paper presents an extended validation of a novel scale assessing ageism among dental students. Method and materials A previously pilot-tested 27-question scale applied to a larger sample (n = 315) from two U.S. dental schools with Principal Component Analysis used to assess internal structure of the measure. Questions whose deletion increased the overall alpha loading on >1 factor or those unexpectedly grouped in another factor were thoroughly examined. Results The scale resulted in five statements (grouped in two factors), which explained 63% of the overall variance with a substantially higher reliability value than other solutions (0.76). Two factors highly correlated were grouped together in a single scale. The five statements are "Elderly people do not take good care of their teeth" (0.62), "Elderly patients do not usually comply with dental advice" (0.93), "The Elderly patient does not live long enough to make it worthwhile to invest time and effort in complex dental treatment" (0.81), "The elderly patient does not live long enough to make it worthwhile to invest money in expensive dental treatment" (0.95), and "Dental treatment of elderly patients is too time-consuming" (0.57). Conclusions Five items achieved high reliability toward the validity of this scale.