Dental health attitudes and behaviour of dental students haviour of patients in tooth brushing.8 It has first students were informed that the participation in been administered in Japan and demonstrated to this study was voluntary base. Students willing to be a useful instrument in understanding the per- complete the questionnaire remained in the class. ceptions of patients and oral health behaviour. The inclusion criteria were, i) to response all the Then it has been used for evaluating the differenc- questions of the inventory, ii) to state gender and es in oral health behaviours between dental stu- date of birth. dents from different countries due to the curricu- First 3 years of dental education was preclini- lum dissimilarities of dental schools9-11 and variety cal and last 2 years were clinical years. Among between the cultures.11,12 There are also several 1022 dental students (667 preclinical and 355 studies on gender differences.13-20 Previous stud- clinical students), 842 (82%) (544 preclinical and ies on dental students, which mostly majored on 298 clinical students) were willing to participate the comparison of the first and advanced years of (the response rate of the preclinical students was education, showed that the final year dental stu- 82% and the clinical students was 84%) and 764 dents had significant improvements in oral hy- (75%) of them were included in the study. Out of giene practices, attitudes and behaviour.11,13,20-22 As 764 students, 486 (64%) were preclinical (89% of far as to our knowledge, there are very few studies the responded preclinical students) and 278 (36%) comparing preclinical and clinical students with were clinical (93% of the responded clinical stu- inconsistent results.19,23 dents) students. Distribution of the students by the The aim of this study was to compare the dif- level of dental education, gender and mean age is ferences in self-reported oral health attitudes and shown in Table 2. behaviour between preclinical and clinical dental When calculating the HU-DBI scores; one point students in Turkey using HU-DBI. was given for each of agree responses to the items 4, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19 and one point was given for each MAtErIALs And MEtHods of disagree response to the items 2, 6, 8, 10, 14, The HU-DBI is a 20-item questionnaire in di- 15. Maximum HU-DBI score was 12. Higher scores chotomous response format (agree/disagree). signify better oral behaviour.8 The original HU-DBI questionnaire was written in Statistical analysis Japanese. Turkish translation of the HU-DBI20 and The SPSS version 15.0 was used for perform- additional 7 items was used in this study (Table 1, ing statistical analyses throughout the study. The items 21 to 27). The translation was discussed with Chi-square test was used for categorical data and two Turkish bilinguists. Back-translation was used Mann-Whitney U test for ordinal level data. Back- during the translation process. After minor chang- ward stepwise regression was carried out on the es were made, data for testing the validity of self- dependent variables (level of education and gen- rating scales were collected from a convenience der). Statistically significance was based on prob- sample of 26 bilinguists (mean age 36.23±6.83). ability values of equal or less than 0.05. Bilinguists were asked to answer each version of the questionnaire separately at different times (a rEsuLts week apart). The reliability of the translated ver- Table 1 shows the items of the HU-DBI and sion was measured using Cohen’s Kappa. Kappa Table 3 shows the percentage distribution of the coefficient of the each 20 items was 1.0. students with agree response by the level of edu- Three of 6 old public dental faculties (being in cation. Significant differences (P<.01) were found dental education more than 40 years), University for 18 of 27 items between the preclinical and the of Marmara and Istanbul (both in Istanbul), and clinical students and described in detail under in University of Gazi (in Ankara) were included in this following sections. study. The questionnaire was distributed among 1022 dental students from all five academic years Oral health attitudes from three dental faculties at the beginning of the The preclinical students were more frequent- academic year 2005-2006. On the day of survey, at ly worrying about colour of their teeth (39%) and the end of a lecture, the questionnaire was distrib- gums (25%) compared to the clinical students uted among all students present in the class. The 254 European Journal of Dentistry