Ideal role behaviours as seen by dentists and patients themselves and by their role partners: do they differ?

The aim of this study was to determine whether patients and dentists differ in their ideal role expectations concerning each others behaviour. This was done by further analysing a set of data containing responses to 124 five-class Likertian statements about ideal role expectations and questions about the background of the respondents with regard to different aspects of the dentist-patient relationship. The study groups consisted of a representative sample of lay people and all dentists in the Finnish Provinces Kuopio and North Karelia. To extract areas of ideal role expectations for both dentists and patients, orthogonal factor analyses were applied to the data. To evaluate the dissimilarity of the structure of the factor analyses, rotated factor matrices were used to conduct transformation analysis. Similarities between the ideal role expectations of dentists and patients were studied. When studied with transformation analysis, the ideal role expectations of dentists and patients were found to differ for both the ideal patient and the ideal dentist. However, dentists and patients shared expectations concerning one characteristic of the ideal dentist i.e. the importance of mutual communication, which was also considered the most important characteristic of the ideal dentist. For the characteristics of the ideal patient, the two groups shared the same expectations concerning the manageability of the patient. Previous research has compared dentist and patient expectations based only on single statements. No reports based on factor analysed data have been published, but transformation analysis was found to provide a useful tool for statistical evaluation of the dissimilarity of the factor structures.