YouTube as an information source in paediatric dentistry education: Reliability and quality analysis

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE YouTube as an information source in paediatric dentistry education: Reliability and quality analysis İlhan Uzel ID1*, Behrang Ghabchi1, Ayşe Akalın2, Ece Eden1 1 Department of Pedodontics, School of Dentistry, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, 2 Dental Private Practice, Türkiye * Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Uzel İ, Ghabchi B, Akalın A, Eden E (2023) YouTube as an information source in paediatric dentistry education: Reliability and quality analysis. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0283300. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0283300 Editor: Tai Ming Wut, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HONG KONG Received: September 27, 2022 Accepted: March 6, 2023 Published: March 24, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Uzel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information files. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction In the era of Covid 19 pandemic, the audio-visual contents of YouTube™ could be an information source for dental students, practitioners, and patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality, content, and demographics of YouTube™ videos about pediatric dentistry for the education of dentistry students. Materials and methods A search on YouTube™ was performed using the keywords "pediatric dentistry”, “pediatric dental treatments”, “primary teeth treatments" in Turkish. The first 50 videos selected for each keyword were evaluated. Parameters of the videos such as the number of views, the days since the upload, the duration of the video, and the number of likes and dislikes were recorded. Videos are categorized by upload source and content categories as an academic, dentist, physician, patient, reporter, and other, and average points are obtained for the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark. The normality of the data was evaluated with the Shapiro-Wilk test. The data were not distributed normally, compared with the Kruskal Wallis test between source and content groups. The Dunn’s Post Hoc was used to determine to find out which group caused the difference. The Spearman Correlation coefficient was calculated to assess a possible correlation between JAMA, GQS, and VPI scores. All significance levels were set at 0.05. Results The duplicates and non-related ones were removed from 150 videos and remaining 119 videos were evaluated. Most of the videos were uploaded by the dentists and other categories, and mainly the videos were uploaded for patient education. JAMA score was 1 out of 4 for 55 videos, 2 for 63 videos, and 3 for only 1 video. When the video source groups were compared, the difference was statistically significant (p = 0.01). The difference between academic and patient groups (p = 0.007); the dentist and patient groups were statistically significant (p = 0.02). PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283300 March 24, 2023 1/9 PLOS ONE Information source in paediatric dentistry education Conclusion YouTube platform does not contain videos of appropriate quality to support the education of dentistry students in pediatric dentistry in Turkish. Introduction COVID-19 disease (or SARS-CoV-2 virus) is a public health problem that emerged towards the end of 2019 and affected the whole world. This disease, which was declared a “Pandemic” by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, has adversely affected many sectors and caused serious problems in both practicing medicine and receiving education in the dental field. With the decision of the government, face-to-face training and exams have been suspended for an indefinite period in our country, as in many countries, due to efforts to minimize social contact to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. On the other hand, the students had to receive digitalized education and were led to educate themselves—even partially—by obtaining information from various platforms on their own means. Web sites and various social media have rushed to the assistance of students in this regard [1]. Social media is a Web 2.0 technology that was founded in 1979 when Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University created a worldwide discussion system that enabled internet users to broadcast public messages [2]. Nowadays, with the development and spread of social media, people have been given the freedom to present their ideas and information in the format they want, and an environment where people are given the opportunity to produce content and access this information easily. In this wide range of topics, many contents related to health are also found. Traditionally, information about medicine and dentistry was available in direct consultation with experts trained in this field. But today, with the use of the internet in every field in developed countries, it has become popular for people to use online resources to access this information [3]. Although the tendency to search for medical information on the internet varies potentially according to age, habit, and location, it has been reported that up to 75% of people use the internet for this purpose [4]. The content provided by social media on health is frequently used not only for informing patients but also for educating students. It has been determined that various educational approaches, especially in social media such as Wikipedia, YouTube ™, and Facebook, are frequently used by dentists and medical professionals to get information [5, 6]. Among the changes that have taken place in dental education in recent years, there is also the integration of electronic methods that support multimedia presentations and e-learning strategies in the education of faculty members. A related innovation has been the use of participatory Internet websites, called Web 2.0 content, as they allow academic institutions to provide students with appropriate information with 24/7 accessibility [7]. Since the development and upload of health-related information on the internet are not limited to professionals and it can be done by everyone, it can be assumed that false information, as well as correct information, will also exist [7, 8]. YouTube ™, a social media platform where people from all over the world upload, share, and watch videos in a simple and integrated manner was founded in the United States in 2005 by 3 former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim [9–11]. While YouTube™ is the largest and most popular video hosting platform, it is a free video sharing service that is currently the second largest search engine after Google [12, 13]. YouTube ™ offers e (...truncated)