Factors Affecting Preventive Dental Treatment of Adolescents in Korea

Seon-Hui Kwak, Soo-Myoung Bae, Sun-Jung Shin and Bo-Mi Shin
Additional contact information
Seon-Hui Kwak: Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Dentistry, Gangneung Wonju National University, Gangneung-si 25457, Korea
Soo-Myoung Bae: Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Dentistry, Gangneung Wonju National University, Gangneung-si 25457, Korea
Sun-Jung Shin: Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Dentistry, Gangneung Wonju National University, Gangneung-si 25457, Korea
Bo-Mi Shin: Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Dentistry, Gangneung Wonju National University, Gangneung-si 25457, Korea

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 14, 1-21

Abstract: We conducted a multilevel analysis to identify factors affecting adolescents’ preventive dental treatment experience in South Korea. We sampled 72,435 students who participated in the 9th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey. The individual-level variables were divided into demographic factors, socioeconomic factors, oral health behavioral factors, and oral symptom experience factors. The regional-level variables included oral health resources, rate of students receiving oral health education at school by region, social deprivation index, and the number of private educational institutions. A higher rate of receiving oral health education in school by region was associated with increased fluoride application (1.04 times, p = 0.003). However, the number of private educational institutes per 1000 people was negatively associated with fluoride application experienced by students (0.64 times, p = 0.039). Students underwent more scaling when there were more dentists per 10,000 individuals (1.14 times, p = 0.008) and less scaling in areas with a higher social deprivation index (0.88 times, p = 0.024). To increase the access to preventive care for oral diseases among adolescents, a preventive system should be established in schools, and a primary dental care system should be established through the cooperation of the government, private dental clinics, and schools.

Keywords: adolescent health; multilevel analysis; oral health; social context; social health determinants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/14/4948/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/14/4948/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:14:p:4948-:d:382214

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().