Utilising Text Mining to Determine Japanese Dental Hygiene Students' Perceptions of Dental Hygienists and Dentists.

Objectives: This longitudinal text-mining study examines dental hygiene students' perceptions of dental hygienists and dentists at three different points in time during their training course. The null hypothesis of the study was that there would be no change in the dental hygiene students' perceptions of the dental hygienists and dentists over the course of 3 years.

Materials and methods: First-year dental hygiene students participated in this study beginning with the academic year 2020. The questionnaires were conducted in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Participants were asked to write their perceptions of dental hygienists and dentists on the questionnaire sheets, and a quantitative text-mining analysis was performed.

Results: Initially, 59 female students were assessed for enrollment in this study, and the overall participation rate was 88.1%. The first-year students' perceptions of dental hygienists were "assist" and "beside" the dentist based on the co-occurrence group, while in the second-year, "cleaning" and "tooth" emerged in this group, and a new group of "cordinal-listen-story" materialised. In the third year, these groups merged into one group centered on "kind." In the perceptions of dentists, the word "fear" was the most frequent before clinical training, while the frequency of the world "kind" increased after clinical training. The word "treat" was ranked third in the second year of curriculum and then first in the final year.

Conclusions: The null hypothesis was rejected. It can be concluded that if interactions between dental hygiene and dental students are systematically incorporated from early undergraduate education, clinical practice will be more meaningful and lead to stronger intraprofessional collaboration in future clinical practice.