Parents' perspective towards dental radiography for children

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Radiographs provide critical information on developmental and eruption problems, detection of interface caries, pulpal and periapical pathologies in clinical examination. This study aimed to evaluate parents' knowledge, attitudes and behaviors towards dental radiographs. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted on the parents of 396 children who visited to the Pediatric Dentistry clinics. All participants were asked to answer a total of 26 questions. A questionnaire was developed to assess participants' attitudue, behavior and knowledge toward pediatric dental radiographies and provided information on their demographic characteristics. The number of positive attitudes and correct answers was scored based on items asked to the participants. In order to analyze the effect of demographic data on the obtained scores, a multivariate linear regression model was created. The significance level was accepted as 0.05 in all analyzes. RESULTS: Children's dental radiography experience affects parents' attitude score towards dental radiographs (t = 4.375, P < 0.001). Parents' level of knowledge about dental radiography has a positive effect on their attitudes (t = 5.510, P = 0.005). The education level of the parents and the frequency of visits to the dentist have a significant effect on the knowledge level of the parents about dental radiography (P < 0.05). When the correlation between knowledge and attitude scores is analyzed, it is observed that there is a statistically significant, weak and positive correlation between the two variables (r = 0.34, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: In conclusion, parents who did not had dental radiographs before have a more negative attitude towards dental radiographs than those who have had dental radiographs.