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

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.

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.

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).

YouTube platform does not contain videos of appropriate quality to support the education of dentistry students in pediatric dentistry in Turkish.