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Empathy of dental students towards children after behaviour guidance lectures and clinical experience
Author(s) -
Souror Yasser R.,
Aljehani Dareen K.,
Alshaikh Malath H.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
european journal of dental education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.583
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1600-0579
pISSN - 1396-5883
DOI - 10.1111/eje.12523
Subject(s) - empathy , cronbach's alpha , clinical psychology , arabic , psychology , scale (ratio) , internal consistency , medicine , medical education , psychiatry , psychometrics , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The empathetic behaviour of dentists is essential for perfect patient care. Because the behaviour of child patients in a dental clinic differs from that exhibited by the adults, knowing of empathy of dental students towards the child in the dental clinic is an important concern. Methods We distributed a modified form of the Health Professions Student version (HPS‐version) of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) to dental students in two rounds: (R1) before and (R2) after introducing behaviour guidance subcourse and exposure to 3 clinical experiences with children to measure changes in empathy of dental students towards child patients. The modifications include replacing the “patient” words with “child patients” and translation into Arabic. We checked the internal consistency of the modified form of HPS‐version by Cronbach's coefficient alpha test. The significance level was set at 0.05 for all statistical analyses. Results Out of eighty‐one, sixty‐five dental students completed the survey and attended a behaviour guidance course and three clinical sessions. The questionnaire showed accepted reliability. There was a significant decrease in the empathy of dental students in R2 than R1 ( P < .05). The level of empathy for males was less than female students in both rounds ( P < .05). Conclusions The clinical interaction of children by dental students inhibits their empathy towards child patients, and a specific training course is needed to improve dental students’ empathy towards children since learning behaviour guidance may not sufficient.