Determining Cut-Off Points for the Dental Fear Survey

Figure 3

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve using the Dental Fear Survey (DFS). Responses to the question “Are you fearful of going to the dentist?” were assigned to binary categories, “not fearful/low fearfulness” (“not fearful” and “a little fearful”) and “highly fearful” (“very fearful” and “extremely fearful”). A DFS score of 52.5, representing the best compromise between sensitivity (0.89) and specificity (0.92), was chosen as the cut-off point for “highly fearful.” Area under the curve (AUC) = 0.977; .