Determining Cut-Off Points for the Dental Fear Survey

Figure 2

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for the Dental Fear Survey (DFS). Responses to the question “Are you fearful of going to the dentist?” were assigned to binary categories, “not fearful” or “fearful.” A DFS score of 35.5, representing the best compromise between sensitivity (0.81) and specificity (0.81), was chosen as the cut-off point for “fearful.” Area under the curve (AUC) = 0.903; .