Early childhood caries and parents’ challenges in implementing oral hygiene practices: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Early childhood caries (ECC) is highly prevalent with significant long-term consequences. Parents are primarily responsible for the oral health practices of their children. Parents' health beliefs, attitudes, and cultural factors influence oral health practices. AIM: To explore and understand the perceptions and challenges faced by the parents of the children with ECC in performing routine oral hygiene practices for their children. DESIGN: We conducted a qualitative description study with the parents of children with ECC. Data were collected through five focus groups using culturally appropriate, semi-structured, open-ended questions and probes. Focus groups were audiotaped, and field notes were taken, which were transcribed verbatim after each focus group session. Data were analyzed using content analyses. RESULTS: A vast majority of the participants were aware of the significance of oral hygiene. However, they faced challenges in implementing proper home hygiene practices at home and lacked knowledge about the type of toothpaste and toothbrush to be used for their children. CONCLUSION: The parents of the children with ECC face a severe knowledge gap, which is interfering with the selection of proper oral hygiene aids for their children. They also face barriers in implementing oral hygiene routines for their children, in spite of awareness that tooth brushing is important.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".