Parents' attitudes towards topical fluoride and vaccines for children: Are these distinct or overlapping phenomena?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite attention paid to parental refusal of child vaccines, the phenomenon of topical fluoride refusal is poorly understood. We examine the extent to which parent attitudes and Internet use regarding topical fluoride treatment and vaccines may overlap and, in turn, uniquely or distinctly correlate with fluoride and vaccine refusal for the child. In 2017, we analyzed data collected from 2011 to 12 for 361 children from three Washington state dental clinics. The instrument included analogous measures of topical fluoride and vaccine safety concerns, perceived severity of preventable cavities/disease, and Internet use for fluoride/vaccine information; and measures of non-fluoridated toothpaste use, attitudes towards dental x-rays and amalgam and composite fillings. We assessed dental chart-based topical fluoride refusal occurring in 2009 or 2010 and parent-reported vaccine refusal. All analogous fluoride and vaccine items were substantively correlated. However, in a series of adjusted models, none of these items were significantly associated with fluoride refusal. Multiple fluoride and vaccine items were associated with vaccine refusal in unadjusted models; but only vaccine safety concerns, perceived severity of a preventable cavity, and Internet use for vaccine information remained significant in adjusted models. Although there is concordance between the two refusal behaviors as well as analogous attitudes and Internet use, these findings challenge the idea that fluoride refusal should be addressed with interventions focusing on vaccine refusal. Further research is required on the factors underlying refusal of preventive dental care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".