• 한국학교ㆍ지역보건교육학회지
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• 제21권1호
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• pp.33-45
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• 2020

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to analyze the research trends on oral health literacy in South Korea and to suggest the direction of future research, Methods: The literatures were searched using KISS, RISS, KMBASE, KoreaMed, Nanet and NDSL. A total of 17,433 documents were retrieved by database searching. The final 34 literatures that satisfied the inclusion criteria were selected for analyzing. A content analysis was performed on 34 literatures on the topics of oral health literacy which had been published from 2012 to 2019. Results: Most of the 34 literatures, 23 articles and 11 thesises were descriptive-correlation studies, but there was no intervention study. The participants studied in the selected literatures were mostly adults followed by elderly and other groups including foreigner. More troubling sufficient samples and sampling methods were lacking at the population level. The validation of the used health literacy instruments was not sufficient. Conclusions: The unification of translation terminology for oral health literacy and the standardized instrument to test oral health literacy are needed. And to improve the level of oral health literacy, studies should be conducted using various variables. It is also necessary to develop the oral health education programs that can improve the level of oral health literacy. In the future, meta-analysis on the oral health literacy are needed for cumulating findings and drawing more reliable and general conclusions.