Kapping the KAP

Introduction: KAP surveys in healthcare are focused evaluations that measure changes in human knowledge, attitudes, and practices in response to a specific intervention. It is a representative study of a specific population to collect information on what is known, believed, and done in relation to a particular topic. It quantifies and measures a phenomenon using reliable and valid questionnaires along with statistical processing of the information collected. This helps in assessing the need, planning, and implementing public health programs to ensure good research quality. Paediatric dentists and other health professionals have incorporated the use of the KAP survey as a means of research, but there is still a gap that needs to be bridged between what is known and what is to be done to carry out a KAP survey.
Aim: The aim of this study is to compare the knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) regarding KAP surveys between paediatric dentists and other healthcare professionals.
Methodology: A customized questionnaire survey is being formed and the question items are validated by six panel experts using two content validity indices: I-CVI = 0.8 and S-CVI = 0.9. This validated questionnaire is shared through electronic means utilizing snowball sampling technique. A detailed survey-based analysis will be carried out later for data evaluation and for concluding the inference after results are obtained.
Results:  Only 26.7% of paediatric dentists and 8% of other dental specialties were aware about the level of evidence of a KAP survey.
20% of paediatric dentists and 13% of other dental specialties think that social and cultural factors govern the results of a KAP survey questionnaire.
20% of paediatric dentists and 21% of other dental specialties would consider only unique visitors of your survey in the statistical analysis.
10% of paediatric dentists and 7% of other dental specialties believes that a KAP survey should last 16-18 weeks ideally.
22% of paediatric dentists and 11% of other dental specialties are likely to implement the recommendations from a KAP survey in their clinical practice.
Discussion: Mallah, N. et al (2020) strongly reported:
• Inconsistent reporting of validation methodologies
• Abuse of the term validation
• Substantial risk of falsely generating the opinions and attitudes
Most of the participants had knowledge regarding the KAP model & expressed a positive attitude. However, there was a significant difference in attitude & practice because of insufficient research skills, lack of familiarity with research studies, and a lack of access to resources.
Conclusion: Thus, conducting a KAP survey is challenging for a variety of reasons for both paediatric dentists and other dental professionals. This is because data can be hard to interpret accurately, a lack of a standardized approach to validate findings, and analyst biases in KAP surveys. A main criticism of KAP surveys is that their findings generally lead to prescriptions for mass behaviour modification instead of targeting interventions toward individuals. In order to gain a thorough grasp, researchers recommend using participant observations, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews.