Correlates of past year dental health visits: findings from the Indiana black men's health study

Abstract

Adult black men in this sample underutilized dental services. Results suggest several factors that can be used to target Black men to increase utilization rates. In particular, social support may be a promising factor that should be explored in further studies.

Impact of social support on oral health among immigrants and ethnic minorities: A systematic review

“…The sample size of the included studies ranged from 122 [37] to 41,220 participants [31]. Social support level was assessed by using various social support indicators such as social network size [30, 47, 48, 52–54], social engagment, connection, and integration [24, 30, 32, 37, 47, 54], emotional support [2, 44, 48, 49], financial support [44, 52, 53] and instrumental support [36], or by adapting certain scales [18, 31, 34, 35, 40–43, 45, 51, 55].…”

“…Among the included studies, bivariate analysis was used in 25 of them. The applied tests included Rao-Scott chi-square tests [30], weighted frequencies/percentages[30], Pearson’s chi-square tests [18, 31, 37, 38, 41, 49], Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests [31], Fisher’s exact chi-square test [51], the Sidak test [51], the Kruskal-Wallis test [35], the Mantel-Haenzel v2-test [35], analysis of variance (ANOVA) [42, 50, 53], and the Spearman correlation [52]. One study used univariate logistic regression instead of the bivariate test [2].…”

“…Next, multivariate analysis was applied among the included studies to determine the association between social support, oral health status/behavior, and controlling factors. Twenty studies used multivariate logistic regression [2, 18, 24, 31, 35–44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54], while other studies used multiple linear regression [30, 51]], binominal logistic regression [32], negative binominal regression [46], hierarchical linear models [50], and hierarchical block design in multivariate analyses [52]. A generalized estimating equation approach was used by one study to estimate the probability of reporting dental problems among immigrants, taking into consideration individual heterogeneity and controlling for the individual stock of independent variables [56].…”

“…Fifteen studies (58%) determined the effect of social support on dental care utilization [2, 18, 24, 31, 32, 39, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52–55, 57]. Immigrants and ethnic minorities who were socially integrated into a large network and received social support from individuals around them had visited the dental office in the past 1–2 years for treatment and preventive purposes [2, 24, 31, 32, 39, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54, 55, 57]. In addition, mothers who were part of a social network and had received social support reported taking their children to the dentist for treatment and preventive appointments more frequently (starting from a young age) compared with children whose mothers had not received any form of social support [18, 43].…”

No Longer an Island: A Social Network Intervention Engaging Black Men Through CBPR

“…There has been considerably less focus on Black males and the relationship between social engagement and/or social support in other health domains including overall health and wellness. Examples include studies that have identified associations between higher levels of social support and dental utilization (Stapleton et al, 2015) and colorectal cancer screening (Rogers et al, 2017). A photovoice study with Black men by Ornelas and colleagues reported that social capital and intergenerational mentoring were important factors for men's health (Ornelas et al, 2009).…”