Validity and reliability of patient satisfaction questionnaires in a dental school in Japan

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to construct questionnaires for the dental school setting from freely given patient answers with the aid of text mining, and to confirm the structure, reliability and validity of the questionnaires. Methods: Using these questionnaires, we carried out a survey of the satisfaction of patients treated at the Dental Hospital of the Tsurumi University School of Dental Medicine. A total of 3394 patients participated in the study. To confirm the reliability of inter-item correlations and construct validity, factor analysis was carried out, and items belonging to each factor and Cronbach's alpha coefficients were calculated. Results: Four factors were extracted and 64.0% of the variance was explained by these four factors. All correlation coefficients were > 0.85. These four factors were: 'Treatment', 'Communication', 'Facilities' and 'Appearances'. From structural equation modelling, we determined that overall satisfaction was > 0.75 and was statistically significant. Conclusion: The questionnaires used in this study are useful for measuring patient satisfaction in the dental school hospital setting.