Development and Validation of Questionnaire to Assess the Faculty Perception on the Dental Public Health Curriculum in India

Background: The dental academicians being in a unique central position between the students and the decision makers play a significant role in translating the advocacy efforts of the dental council to policy actions. The academicians’ opinions, inputs, and their perspectives will help to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in the curriculum. However, this requires a reliable measurement tool to assess and document/report the current gaps in the curriculum in a systematic way. Hence, the present study aims to develop and validate an instrument for the assessment of faculty perception on undergraduate dental public health curriculum. Subjects and Methods: The Development and validation of the questionnaire was conducted in three phases with 5 academic dental public health (DPH) professionals using mixed-method approach, combining quantitative-qualitative methodologies. First, the conceptual framework was designed using the themes derived from the focus group discussion (FGD) and followed by identification of domains and item pool generation for the instrument. This resulted in a preliminary version of the questionnaire with 6 domains and a section on internal evaluation of teaching and learning practices followed at individual dental institutions, totally comprising of 83 items. Second, an assessment of face and content validity, readability of the core set of the items was performed. The final questionnaire was an online version for pilot testing before actual field implementation. Results: The new semi-structured, validated questionnaire was developed with 76 items, which was objectively tested and rated as having “very good” face validity with a score of 3.5 out of 4. The content validity was confirmed using Aiken’s index for adequacy of the domains coverage (6 domains establishing the comprehensiveness of the new questionnaire) with sufficient number of items to adequately measure the domain of interest. Conclusion: A new valid instrument for the assessment of faculty perception on undergraduate DPH curriculum has been developed. The use of this type of questionnaire appears to be a valuable tool for dental curriculum research.