Abstract
This study was conducted to identify actual dental care status, levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about dental health, and dental health conditions in elementary students; and examine the relationships between the levels of knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and dental health conditions for 427 students in their sixth grades from six elementary schools in Pusan area from November 1st to December 5th, 2002. The data was collected through a structured study questionnaire and through dental checkups by dentists and was analyzed into frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson's correlation analysis using SPSS program. The main results of this study were summarized as follows： 1) The levels of knowledge, attitudes, behaviors about dental health was found to be high as mean score 18.75 points (64.7％) in knowledge, 17.86 points (59.5％) in attitudes, and 31.64 points (67.3％) in behaviors. Therefore they were found to care a lot about their dental health. The indices of dental health conditions were found to be low as mean score 0.87 pieces (3.1％) of treated teeth, 1.27 pieces (4.5％) of teeth to be treated, 7.64％ of the DMFT rate and 0.43 points (7.2％) of the simplified oral hygiene index. Therefore their condition of dental health was found to be very clean. 2) The relationships among the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about dental health showed a weak level of positive correlations. Among the conditions of dental health, treated teeth and the DMFT rate showed a moderate level of positive correlation； and treated teeth and the simplified oral hygiene index showed weak level of positive correlation. 3) The condition of dental health of the subjects of this study was found to be good and dental care was properly done when there was participation of parents and school health educators in dental care. It tells us that dental education is required not only for children but also for their parents. As there were significant correlations between knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about children's dental heath, school health educators should encourage students to have continuous dental care habits for lifelong dental health with repetitive education, rather than to deliver simple knowledge to students during dental health education.
