Student Research
The Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health is an academic centre
of excellence with strong emphasis on social and preventive dentistry. A number
of staff and students involved with ARCPOH pursue academic research. Higher
degree research students in Social and Preventive Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology
include:
Current student research projects:
Kelly Jones
Kelly has a background in Political Theory and Public Health. Her PhD involves
the statistical and clinical validation of a priority setting algorithm for access
to public dental care in South Australia. The algorithm to be validated has been
developed by ARCPOH from previous research investigating the development of a
parsimonious model for access to dental care based on self-reported relative
need and dentists assessment of urgency.
Archana Pradhan
Archana
has a dental background. She completed an Honours programme in this centre with
a project tiltled: Oral health promotion strategies for Nepal. She is currently
close to completion of a PhD in the area of special needs. The focus of her PhD
research is: Oral care for adults with physical and intellectual disabilities.
It explores the oral health status and preventive dental practice among people
aged 18-44 years with physical and intellectual disabilities living in three
residential settings.
The overall goal of the project is to determine characteristics of carers and
organisations that have potential to improve the oral health of adults with physical
and intellectual disabilities.
Previous student research projects:
Jason Armfield
Jason is undertaking research to test a number of aspects of a new model
of the aetiology of fear. Although the model relates to fears in general it is
also applicable to clinical manifestations of fear such as many specific phobias
(e.g. dental phobia, spider phobia etc.). It is proposed that a crucial mediating
factor in the development of a specific fear is the perceptual qualities of the
fear-relevant stimulus or situation. It is argued that certain stimulus characteristics
give rise to a cognitive representation of vulnerability in relation to the stimulus.
More specifically, this cognitive representation, or vulnerability schema,
is comprised of perceptions of a stimulus along the dimensions of negative outcome,
uncontrollability, and unpredictability. Although these variables are argued
to contribute to an overall sense of vulnerability they are proposed as being
both conceptually and perceptually discrete.
Loc Do
Loc has a dental background and is currently doing a PhD in Population Oral Health.
Loc has completed a Master of Science in Dentistry in this centre with a project
titled “Smoking and periodontal disease in the middle-aged Vietnamese
population”. Two journal papers produced from the above project have
been accepted for publication in the journal of Community Dentistry and Oral
Epidemiology and the Journal of International Academy of Periodontology.
Loc’s PhD project is underway and it aims to explore possible changes
in the prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis in South Australian children
after initiation of policies aiming to control excessive fluoride exposure.
This project is nested in the Child Oral Health Study, a large multi-site study
investigating the relationships between fluoride intake, behaviour and diet
with dental caries. Together with Professor John Spencer, Dr Anna Puzio and
Jason Armfield, Loc has succeeded in a Faculty of Health Sciences B1 grant
and an Australian Dental Research Foundation grant to pursue his research.
Liana Luzzi
Liana's research involves examining factors which influence the use of public
funded dental services in South Australia, particularly the use of emergency
dental services among adults eligible for public funded dental care. Use of
emergency dental services is of particular interest because of the increased
demand for emergency care within the public dental system and because of the
long waiting lists for general care. Her research is being done as an adjunct
to an existing data collection for a project entitled 'Relative Needs Index'
(RNI) (PIs: Spencer AJ, Roberts-Thomson KF). The sample she is therefore using
are those people who were recruited for the RNI study.
Her research consists of three components. The first component involves using
a questionnaire to collect information about patients' dental beliefs, values
and attitudes and their use of the public dental services in order to investigate
factors influencing dental attendance. The second component involves extracting
data from the EXACT management information system installed at South Australian
Dental Service Community Dental Service clinics to examine longitudinal patterns
of service use among the RNI sample. The third component of her research comprises
using data on patient's subjective oral health status and dentist's assessment
of urgency collected for the RNI to develop models to predict urgency of dental
treatment by examining associations between patient perceived need and clinical
judgment of urgency.
Dr Suzanna Mihailidis
Suzanna has a dental background, and is currently close to completion
of a PhD in the area of dental health economics, and a Bachelor of Economics.
The focus of her Ph.D. research is: econometric modelling of the private dental
health care sector in Australia using both cross-sectional and longitudinal
production function analyses.
Anne Sanders
Anne has a background in dental therapy and is conducting research exploring
the distribution of adult oral health in the Australian population. She has
found systematic inequalities in outcomes distributed along a monotonic gradient
closely aligned to the social hierarchy. Adults ranked higher in socioeconomic
position had identifiably better oral health status than those adults occupying
positions immediately below them and this relationship spanned the entire
hierarchy irrespective of the indicator employed to quantify socioeconomic
position. This research takes a social epidemiological approach to examining
the social distribution of oral health among dentate adults and identifies
social factors associated with its distribution. In doing so, it moves beyond
a description of the relationship to propose a conceptual framework to suggest
how socioeconomic position is connected with the oral health of dentate adults.
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