A Short-Form Measure of Dentists' Job Satisfaction

In a time of rapid change in the health care system, dentists' assessments of their jobs provide important insights info areas needing attention in the profession. Using the previously validated Dentist Satisfaction Survey (DSS), our goal was to identify a brief subset of items representing the different dimensions of dentists' job satisfaction that account for a substantial amount of variation in the long-form measure. We describe a 14-item short-form instrument, the DSS-14, that accounts for 93 % of the variation in the DSS total score. The DSS-14 had an internal consistency reliability of 0.71 and a two-month test-retest reliability of 0.87. Although diagnosis of specific problem areas is more limited with the DSS-14 than with the long-form DSS, the short form is a parsimonious tool for general evaluation of dentists' job satisfaction.