Learned resourcefulness and coping with crying in dentists and students

Objectives: To determine if Learned Resourcefulness (LR) is correlated with Coping With the Crying (CWC) child dental patient among either general or pediatric dentists. Learned Resourcefulness is a personal quality of resilience in the face of stress that is considered to be teachable. If it can be shown to be related to Coping with Crying, then it may be possible to teach dentists to improve their comfort with the crying child dental patient by increasing their Learned Resourcefulness. This is one method by which general dentists may be helped to see more children.

Methods: Surveys were mailed to the 110 registered pediatric dentists and to a random sample of 371 general dentists in Illinois. Learned Resourcefulness was measured with Rosenbaum's Self-Control Schedule and Coping With Crying Scale was measured with Zlotgorski's measure, both previously validated. This data set was combined with a previously collected dataset (Hendershot et al. 2002) of 153 dental students.

Results: Using the combined data set, linear regression of the demographic variables on CWC resulted in experience (p=.000) and LR (p=.000) predicting CWC, with the amount of variance explained as 10%. LR correlated with CWC with a Pearson rho= .30 in dental students, but did not correlate significantly with CWC in either general dentists or pediatric dentists.

Conclusions: Learned Resourcefulness is correlated with Coping with the Crying child dental patient in dental students, and so it might be useful to train dental students to manage their stress better when treating crying children, which might encourage them to be more willing to treat children after graduation. However, after graduation, experience is more important in coping than stress management skills.