ArticleThe Pan African medical journal2022
Study motivations, specialty preferences, and empathy of dental students in a Nigerian university.
Article in The Pan African medical journal, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evaluation of Dental Student Empathy Scores Using Cognitive and Effective Empathy Measures.Journal of dental education · 2026Article
- An assessment of Turkish dental students' attitudes career intentions and perceptions regarding specialist training.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Thrombolysis in Family Members of Cerebral Infarction Patients: Structural Equation Modeling Analysis.International journal of general medicine · 2026Article
- Empathy levels among health sciences professors in Latin America: distribution, classification and gender differences.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Levels of Empathy in Students and Professors with Patients in a Faculty of Dentistry.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- SPECIALTY PREFERENCES AMONG UNDERGRADUATE DENTAL STUDENTS IN LAGOS STATE NIGERIA.Annals of Ibadan postgraduate medicine · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: dental training aims to produce committed dentists who are professional and empathetic in providing patient-centered oral healthcare and improved quality of life. This study aimed to assess the motives of dental students to study dentistry, their specialty preferences, and their empathy scores by motives and specialty preference. Methods: this cross-sectional study utilized a self-administered questionnaire designed to assess the empathy measured by the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Professions Student version, motives to study dentistry, dental specialty preferences among students of a dental school in Nigeria. Differences in mean empathy across gender, motives to study dentistry, and specialty preferences were analysed with t-test and ANOVA. P-values of <0.05 were considered significant. Results: a total of 211 students participated fully in the study with a mean age of 21.19 years ± 2.43 and 140 (66.4%) females. Personal interest (27.0%) and failure of admission to other undergraduate programmes (20.9%) were the top two motives for studying dentistry. Oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) was the most preferred specialty (44.1%) and community dentistry and periodontology were the least preferred (2.8%) respectively. The total mean empathy score was 104.06 ± 19.1. The highest empathy score for motivation was for high income from dentistry (112.33 ± 13.34). The participants who preferred paediatric dentistry had the highest empathy score (108.73 ± 13.68). Conclusion: knowledge of the empathy levels, the motivation for studying dentistry, and preferences for particular specialties may encourage trainers to ensure the development of a positive attitude among dental students that is professional and empathetic.
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