# Validated Questionnaire on Intraoral Scanner Effectiveness in Paediatric Patients
## 2 Materials and Methods  
A cross-sectional observational study was conducted on an examined population of 100 children aged between 6 and 12 years who have a knowledge of the Italian language that allowed them to easily understand and answer the questions proposed in the questionnaire. The study was conducted at the Dental Clinic of the Department of Pediatric Dentistry of the University of L'Aquila (Abruzzo, Italy). The study included participants between 6 and 12 year old children who were having their first visit to the Department of Pediatric Dentistry of the University of L'Aquila, regardless of their state of dental health or having previously received dental treatment. On the contrary, patients who demonstrated (themselves or their parents) evident critical issues in understanding the Italian language, those who psychologically were not able to answer the questions of the questionnaire given to them or patients who were not sufficiently cooperative to be scanned for dental arcades were excluded from the study, as they would not have allowed a correct analysis of the results on account of not being able to properly understand the questions administered. Patients whose parents did not consent to their participation in the study and that of their children were also excluded (Table 1). The questionnaire was, therefore, administered to all children and parents who ordinarily attended the pediatric dental clinic university headquarters of our study (those who will meet the criteria of inclusion), within the established time frame, by a dedicated researcher. A few minutes before taking the questionnaire, a second researcher had carried out the examination in the mouth with the scan of the dental arches. The completion phase of the test was performed in the waiting room by distributing the questionnaire to the present parent and explaining the content of each question. As for children, the same researcher who administered the questionnaire to parents filled in the questionnaire by recording the answers to the questions. The question was read to the child by the researcher; the child reported a verbal response noted by the same researcher on the questionnaire. At all stages of compilation, the parent was not able to help their child in the response. Of the sample of children/parents employed for the study, 50 were re-examined 4 weeks after the first visit to re-administer the questionnaire in order to carry out the questionnaire reliability test, using the same researcher used for the first administration. The study was carried out in order to satisfy the following research questions:  
* Whether and to what extent the use of the scanner will facilitate the parent's understanding of the oral state of health of the child. * Whether and to what extent the use of the scanner will facilitate communication between the dentist and the parents [10],
* If the dental records facilitated by the scanner will be better tolerated and more suitable for the child than the traditional dental records [11]. The administered questionnaire (Figure 1) included 17 questions, of which the first 11 were addressed to the parent and the last 6 were reserved for pediatric patients. Both parties responded only after the conclusion of the first visit in which the dental scan was made. The questions have two different types of answers: the first gives the subject the opportunity to provide a binary answer (yes or no), the second divides into a scale of ten values (0 to 10), indicating the intensity of the phenomenon. The questionnaire was created in Italian and administered to all patients in the above language; the English version was revised by a native speaker. A group of three experts in the dental area and two experts in the pedagogical/didactic and communication areas drew up the questionnaire together, paying the utmost attention to the simple and easy interpretation of the questions by the participants. Several selected project design examples were taken into consideration on the validity of the questionnaire [12; 13; 14].