Determinants of dentists' management of difficult child patients.

This study tested a path-analytic model linking three general classes of dentists' characteristics (demographic variables, structural descriptors of the dental practice, and attitudinal factors) to 20 forms of patient management strategy. Information was obtained from 267 dentists from Victoria, Australia. The attitudinal factors were extracted by factor analysis of the responses to a self-report questionnaire. Two of the four attitudinal factors (Authoritarian and Etiology) had sufficient reliability to be included in the path-analytic model. The results of the linear structural relationships modeling (LISREL) indicated that gender, membership of the Australian Society of Dentistry for Children, two attitudinal factors, and the perceived socioeconomic level of the dentist's clientele constituted the strongest determinants of management strategies used by the dentists.