Plan for the Analysis of Dental Examination Data in the National Preventive Dentistry Demonstration Program

The purpose of the National Preventive Dentistry Demonstration Program is to determine the costs and benefits of various types and combinations of school-based preventive dental care procedures. This Note provides a description of the statistical methods that will be used to analyze the dental data collected in this program. The first chapter provides an overview of the program's design. Chapter 2 describes the variables that will be used in analyzing the baseline and each succeeding year's dental examination data. Chapter 3 describes the procedures that will be used to analyze the baseline data. Chapter 4 describes the procedures that will be used in analyzing the relative and absolute effectiveness of the treatment regimens and how this effectiveness is related to other variables, such as site, initial decay level, age, sex, and socioeconomic status. The final chapter discusses the procedures that will be used to measure the degree to which the program's 31 dental examiners agreed with themselves and each other in the application of the diagnostic criteria. 51 pp. Ref.