ABSTRACT
Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the anxiety levels about education, clinical practice and professional development of dental PhD and specialty program students in Turkey during pandemic process. Methods: In this study, a scale consisting of two parts was developed by researchers and an online survey portal was used to reach the participants. The first part included personal information of participants. In the second part, there were 5-point scale items with three sub-dimensions to determine the anxiety levels about COVID-19. Item pool was constructed with 23 scale items. For the construct validity, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. After the exploratory factor analysis, 3 items exluded from the scale and it resulted in three-factor structure. According to the theoretical background, factors were called as "clinical practice process", "education process" and "professional development process". When the items related to the sub-dimensions were examined, it was seen that education process includes 8 items, clinical practice process includes 9 items and professional process includes 3 items. Then, this three-factor structure with 20 items by the way one factor model based on these three subfactors were tested through confirmatory factor analysis and higher order confirmatory factor analysis. After exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, it was concluded that there was enough evidence for the construct validity. For the reliability study Cronbach alfa coefficients and corrected item-total correlations was calculated. It was observed that the Cronbach alpha coefficients for the education process sub-dimension, the clinical practice process sub-dimension and the professional development process sub-dimension were 0.87, 0.86 and 0.70, respectively. The stratified Cronbach alpha coefficient calculated for the overall scale was 0.90. It was referred that the scores obtained from the sub-dimensions of the scale and by the way for general score were reliable. For the corrected item-total correlations, education process sub-dimension was in the range of 0.559-0.661, clinical practice sub-dimension was in the range of 0.407-0.812, and professional development process sub-dimension was in the range of 0.487-0.534. It was concluded that all items were sufficiently distinctive and served its purpose. Moreover the data based on the scale were analyzed with t-test and Kruskal Wallis H test. With the statistically significant results of Kruskal Wallis H test, Mann-Whitney U test were conducted as post hoc. Results: A total of 208 students (156 females, 52 males) participated. There was no significant difference among anxiety levels of the groups in terms of gender and department variables (p >0.05). However, there was statistically significant difference in terms of age and education year. The students with the ages in the interval of 22-24 had significantly lower anxiety levels regarding the clinical practice process (p <0.05). The anxiety levels of students with more than 4 years in education were significantly lower than other groups regarding education process (p <0.05). Younger students had lower anxiety levels about clinical practice process in PhD or specialty programs. Conclusion: Increase of the year in education leads reducement in the anxiety level about education process.