A review of patient satisfaction: 2. Dental patient satisfaction: an appraisal of recent literature.

This paper examines the way patient satisfaction is perceived in the dental literature. The majority of studies carried out since the early 1980s concentrate on patient perceptions of various service quality attributes and the role that sociodemographic variables play in determining satisfaction. Recent work concerning attribution theory suggests that two concepts, duty and culpability, may be central to explaining this process.