Table 1.
Details of questionnaire recipients, responses before and after reminders, as well as median response time.
Fig 1.
The validation process employed in the present study.
Detailed information on number and order of items, construction of questions and response options are reported in the S2 Doc.
Table 2.
Telephone calls to random representatives of target populations.
These were performed for qualitative assessment of non-responders, as part of the non-response analysis.
Fig 2.
Age distribution in target and sample populations.
Age distribution in target (dog owners registered in the Swedish Board of Agricultures register) and sample populations of dog owners (left) and first vs last quantiles of the sample (right). The sample population had a narrower age distribution than the target population and the last responders were systematically younger than the first responders.
Fig 3.
a. Factor Analysis of the dog owner questionnaire identified two constructs. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed on half the data to identify factors which were tested by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on the other half. Of the five identified factors, the first two were identified as potential constructs. These constructs were named “Dog owners’ attitudes towards brushing their dogs’ teeth” (BrushAttitude) and “Dog owners’ assessment of their dogs’ dental health” (DentalHealth) and coincided with constructs predefined by the authors KBE and AP. Variable loadings are shown for both EFA and CFA. Detailed information on variables and variable/factor (co)-variance is available in S2 Table. 3b. Factor Analysis of the veterinary health practitioner questionnaire identified two constructs. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed on half the data to identify factors which were tested by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on the other half, resulting in two potential constructs. These constructs were named “Veterinary health practitioners’ attitudes towards dental chews and dental feed” (ChewFeed) and “Veterinary health practitioners’ attitudes and opinions on dental problems and dental cleaning” (Cleaning). Variable loadings are shown for both EFA and CFA. Detailed information on variables and variable/factor (co)-variance is available in S2 Table.
Table 3.
Fitness characteristics of factor solutions obtained from Dog Owners (n = 59978) and Veterinary Health Practitioners (n = 1436) surveys.
The data was randomly split in halves: Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed on one half to identify factors and tested on the other half by Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The random split was repeated 10 times to further investigate the stability of identified factors. Values are reported as mean ± standard deviation for the 10 random splits.