Journal of Dental Medicine

Background and Aims: Successful pediatric dentistry depends not only on the dentist's technical skills, but also on his ability to acquire and maintain a child's cooperation. The correction of dentist’ action in this area affects the view of parents and increases the quality of dental services. The objective of this study was to evaluate the attitudes of general dentists toward methods of controlling pediatrics’ behavior in Isfahan.

Materials and Methods: This study is descriptive, analytic, and cross-sectional. For this research, 100 general dentists of Isfahan city were selected with simple random sampling technique and were asked to complete the questionnaire which was included four different management techniques. The data were analyzed with t-test, P earson’s correlation , ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis.

Results: The methods accepted by dentists were Tell-Show-Do (4.0 ± 0.5), Voice control (3.5 ± 0.4), active restraint (3.0 ± 0.5) and Hand-Over-Mouth (2.9 ± 0.5) respectively. The mean score of female dentists’ attitudes was more toward the method of active restraint and less toward Hand-Over-Mouth technique. Also the average score of middle aged dentists’ attitudes toward Voice Control method was less than young dentists and toward Hand-Over-Mouth was higher. The general dentists with more number of pediatric patients had less consent on the method of Hand-Over-Mouth (P=0.004) and active restraint (P=0.034).

Conclusion: There were significant correlation between attitude of general dentists toward behavior management techniques with age, gender, clinical experience and the number of pediatric patients. General dentists have fewer tendencies to aggressive behavior management techniques.

  Background and Aims: Oral health prepares us for daily activities without discomfort, and dissatisfaction. In this research, agreement level between parents and children aged 11-14 year-old in reporting child oral health-related quality of life was studied in Isfahan city.

  Materials and Methods: In this descriptive, analytical and cross-sectional study 128 pairs of parents and children aged 11-14 were selected with random sampling technique from schools in Isfahan and were asked to complete the relevant questionnaires. The questionnaires evaluated quality of life in four fields of oral signs, functional deficits and emotional and social health. In order to evaluate child-parent agreement, intra-correlation coefficient (ICC), Pearson’s correlation coefficient, Spearman’s correlation coefficient and intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) were used (α=0.05).

  Results: The agreements between PPQ_11-14 (parent perception questionnaire), CPQ_11-14 (child perception questionnaire) and the related fields were 0.81, -0.67. The highest agreement level (ICC=0.83) was related to emotional health (excellent), followed by functional deficits (ICC=0.80), social health (ICC=0.69) and oral signs (ICC=0.64). Pearson's test showed significant correlations between CPQ_11-14 and PPQ_11-14 (r=0.81) (P<0.01).

  Conclusion: Although parents, especially mothers, may be used as proxies for their children in relation to quality of life and related fields, the views of both should be obtained in order to fully represent child oral health-related quality of life issues.