The Reliability of clinical and radiographic examinations in the National Preventive Dentistry Demonstration Program

This report documents findings on examiner reliability in the National Preventive Dentistry Demonstration Program. In successive chapters it (1) summarizes the reasons for measuring examiner reliability, reviews the characteristics and findings of recent studies that have assessed it, and identifies important reliability issues that have been neglected in past research; (2) describes the program and the procedures used to collect the data; (3) presents data on interexaminer and intraexaminer consistency in assessing decay both within a year and across years; (4) presents reliability results for other indexes of oral health; and (5) describes the degree to which the program's radiograph readers agreed with themselves and each other in interpreting the X-rays.