A Comparative Study of Shahid Beheshti and Isfahan Universities Dental Students’ Self Confidence in Managing Uncooperative Pediatric Dental Patients (A Cross-sectional Study)

Introduction: Psychological variables affect dental treatment, especially pediatric dentistry, and complicate the control of uncooperative pediatric patients. Therefore, dentists are to use recommended behaviour management techniques to cause cooperative behaviour in order to achieve treatment success. The aim of this study was to assess their behaviour management techniques and self-confidence in coping with uncooperative children in pediatric dentistry in order to help the students have sufficient knowledge and skills to start treatment independently.

Methods and Materials: For this cross sectional-descriptive-analytical study, 50 dental students from Isfahan Medical Science University and 50 from Shahid Beheshti University were selected. Then, a two-part questionnaire was given to each of the participants. The first part, which used a Likert scale, was to evaluate the participants' self-confidence. The second part consisted of open questions for the participants to write their techniques for managing children's behaviour in different situations. The data were analyzed using SPSS software for t-test and the Mann Whitney test. (α=0.05)

Results: The analysis of the data revealed that the dental students had a high level of self-confidence in the majority of situations; in cases that children had uncooperative behaviour, their self-confidence scores were lower. The results of the t-tests showed that the participants’ self-confidence scores did not significantly vary by university or gender. (P value=0.425) Also, a Mann Whitney test revealed that the most commonly observed behaviour management techniques, used by the participants, did not significantly vary by their gender or university. (P value=0.499)

Conclusion: According to the results, gender or university does not have any statistically significant impact on the participants’ scores on self-confidence and behaviour management techniques.