A group of 200 subjects was divided into five groups consisting of
dentist, students of the last year predoctoral dental, students of
pediatric dentistry, students of dental assistants, and pediatric
dentists. The groups were surveyed in order to
elicit their
responses to a series of ten simple line-drawn faces. Each person
was asked in a questionnaire to medicate on a five-point scale the
degree to which an adjective was appropriate or inappropriate for
each simple line-drawn face. Twenty adjectives were repeated for
the ten different faces. Means and standard deviations were
calculated for all responses. Results indicate that each face yielded
a unique set of appropriate adjectives as perceived by all subjects.
Beyond this basic agreement, however, group differences were
found in the selection of other appropriate adjectives. Based upon
a random subset of responses, discriminant analysis correctly
assigned group membership for 96% of the subjects. It was also
found that eight of the ten faces discriminated among the groups
with correct reclassification ranging from 88% to 96%.
