Barriers to pursuing further education among Canadian dental hygienists: a qualitative exploration.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: In recent years, C,anada has seen the development of new educational pathways to baccalaureate education for dental hygienists. Research has demonstrated that degree education strengthens dental hygienists' cognitive and practice abilities and increases career opportunities. However, the 2021 Canadian Dental Hygienists Association (CDHA) Job Market and Employment Survey reported that only 27% of respondents held a baccalaureate degree. The current study was the first to explore levels of interest in and barriers to pursuing degree education among Canadian diploma-holding dental hygienists. Methods: This qualitative explorative study utilized purposeful maximum variation sampling to select Canadian dental hygienists across 10 provinces and 1 territory for 3 e-focus groups. Selected participants (N = 17) were CDHA members who held a dental hygiene diploma as their highest educational credential. E-focus groups were thematically analysed for barriers using Saldaña's descriptive and in vivo coding. Results: All participants expressed an interest in pursuing further education at some point during their career. Reported barriers to doing so were family commitments, financial restrictions, accessibility, limited employer support, unfamiliarity with eligibility criteria, unfamiliarity with existing programs, stress/anxiety over returning to school, and unfamiliarity with the benefits of earning a degree. Conclusions: The qualitative research findings supplemented answer options for a subsequent national online research survey distributed to all CDHA members; results of that survey are not included in this article. National and provincial dental hygiene associations and educational institutions can use the study findings to develop strategies to reduce barriers and raise awareness of degree education among Canadian dental hygienists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".