Profiling alumni of a brazilian public dental school
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2010
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Background: Follow-up studies of former students are an efficient way to organize the entire process of
professional training and curriculum evaluation. The aim of this study was to identify professional profile subgroups
based on job-related variables in a sample of former students of a Brazilian public dental school.
Methods: A web-based password-protected questionnaire was sent to 633 registered dentists who graduated
from the Federal University of Goias between 1988 and 2007. Job-related information was retrieved from 14 closed
questions, on subjects such as gender, occupational routine, training, profits, income status, and self-perception of
professional career, generating an automatic database for analysis. The two-step cluster method was used for
dividing dentists into groups on the basis of minimal within-group and maximal between-group variation, using
job-related variables to represent attributes upon which the clustering was based.
Results: There were 322 respondents (50.9%), predominantly female (64.9%) and the mean age was 34 years (SD =
6.0). The automatic selection of an optimal number of clusters included 289 cases (89.8%) in 3 natural clusters.
Clusters 1, 2 and 3 included 52.2%, 30.8% and 17.0% of the sample respectively. Interpretation of within-group rank
of variable importance for cluster segmentation resulted in the following characterization of clusters: Cluster 1 -
specialist dentists with higher profits and positive views of the profession; Cluster 2 - general dental practitioners in
small cities; Cluster 3 - underpaid and less motivated dentists with negative views of the profession. Male dentists
were predominant in cluster 1 and females in cluster 3. One-way Anova showed that age and time since
graduation were significantly lower in Cluster 2 (P < 0.001). Alternative solutions with 4 and 5 clusters revealed
specific discrimination of Cluster 1 by gender and dental education professionals.
Conclusions: Cluster analysis was a valuable method for identifying natural grouping with relatively homogeneous
cases, providing potentially meaningful information for professional orientation in dentistry in a variety of
professional situations and environments.
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NUNES, Maria F. et al. Profiling alumni of a brazilian public dental school. Human Resources for Health, London, v. 8, n. 20, p. 1-9, 2010.