Background

In Turkey, formal pre-primary education for children 5- 6 years old provides the ideal setting for school-based oral health promotion programs and oral health care services. To develop effective oral health promotion programs, there is a need to assess this target group's subjective oral health needs as well as clinical needs. The Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) is a well-known instrument for assessing oral health quality of life in children aged 0-5 years old and their families. This study aimed to adapt the ECOHIS for children 5-6 years old in a Turkish-speaking community and to undertake a preliminary investigation of its psychometric properties.

Methods

The Turkish version of the ECOHIS was obtained with forward/backward translations, expert panels and pre-testing and it was tested in a convenience sample of 121 parents of 5- 6 year-old children attending nursery classes of three public schools. Data were collected through clinical examinations and self-completed questionnaires. The main analyses were carried out on the imputed data set. The validity of content, face, construct, discriminant and convergent and as well as the reliability of internal and test-retest of the ECOHIS were evaluated. Sensitivity analysis was performed to examine the effect of the complete case analysis for managing "Don't know" responses on the validity and reliability of the ECOHIS.

Results

The analysis of the imputed data set showed that Cronbach's alphas for the child and family sections were 0.92 and 0.84 respectively, and for the whole scale was 0.93. The intraclass correlation coefficient for test-retest was 0.86. The scale scores on the child and parent sections indicating worse quality of life were significantly associated with poor parental ratings of their child's oral health, high caries experience, higher gingival index scores and problem-orientated dental attendance, supporting its construct, convergent and discriminant validity. Sensitivity analysis showed that the mean imputation method and the complete case analysis did not have differing effects on the validity and reliability of the ECOHIS.

Conclusions

This study provided preliminary evidence concerning validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the scale among 5-6-year-old children. Future studies should be conducted on the ECOHIS to evaluate fully its psychometric properties in both community- based and clinically-based studies among parents of children younger than five. This study provides initial evidence that the ECOHIS aimed at children aged 0-5 years may be a useful tool for assessing the oral health quality of life in 6 year - old preschool children.