• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.378-385
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• 2013

Although dental hygiene has haven a special domain of knowledge and its own business territory, people have misunderstandings about dental hygienists as nurses or nirses' aides in Korea. Inadequate knowledge could make negative results for university applicants to choose department of dental hygiene. This study was aimed to compare major and job satisfaction of students and graduates in dental hygiene and nursing for objective comparison and suggestion for dental hygiene. The subjects were 98 dental hygiene students, 113 nursing students, 53 dental hygienists, and 53 nurses by convenience sampling in Daejeon. The questionnaire consisted of satisfaction of college life, social identity, career path and job. ANOVA with Tukey post-hoc analysis was used with SPSS 20.0 program. Although dental hygiene students scored lower than nursing students in satisfaction of college life, social identity, career path and job, dental hygienists, nurse and dental hygiene students didn't have different satisfaction of job. Dental hygienists scored the lowest in relation with clinical work and major curriculum, and sexual discrimination. Nurses scored the lowest in working condition and salary. Dental hygienists and dental hygiene students had lower scores in information and advice of career path, entrance to graduate school, stable work, family's pride of my major, social position and so on. We suggested the community of dental hygiene should try to promote dental hygienists to public, the community of dentists should give the stable working condition, and the department of dental hygiene should improve the major curriculum to relate with clinical work.