Dentist's ratings of child dental-patients' anxiety.

This study investigates the extent to which dentists giving treatment are able to evaluate the (changes in) child patients' levels of fear, based on a comparison between direct behavior observations of a group of highly anxious children during sequential dental visits and video observations of the same group made by two independent evaluators using the measuring instrument described by Venham et al. (9). A significant difference was found between the fear scores given by the two dentists giving treatment and also between their fear scores and those by the independent observers. Both the fear and behavior scores of the two dentists giving treatment, however, clearly correlated with the fear scores of the observers. It is concluded that in this study the two dentists giving treatment were unable to award an unbiased fear score for each treatment given to a child but it was not possible to show that the bias was caused by experiences from previous sessions with the same child. After video training dentists giving treatment are capable of giving a picture of changes in children's fear levels during sequential dental visits.