Cross sectional survey to investigate automaticity of OH behaviours
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Cross sectional survey to investigate automaticity of oral health behaviours, including tooth brushing, interdental cleaning and preventive dental attendance.
IRAS ID
196832
Contact name
Rebecca Harris
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Liverpool
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 16 days
Research summary
Poor oral health can significantly impact on individual lives, resulting in loss of sleep, ability to chew and or speak and heightening self—consciousness and embarrassment. Individuals who live within a low socio-economic (SES) background have significantly more oral disease compared to high SES, resulting in oral health inequalities.
Poor oral health is entirely preventable. Regular tooth brushing with fluoridated toothpaste alongside flossing once daily significantly improves oral health. Regularly visiting the dentist also contributes to good oral health.Oral hygiene and dental visiting behaviours can be viewed through the lens of habitual behaviours. In this context ‘habit’ is defined as ‘a process by which a stimulus generates an impulse to act as a result of a learned stimulus-response association’. Once habitual behaviour is established, they may be unconsciously/automatically performed even when individuals experience high cognitive load or stress from various sources, resulting in advantageous long term behavioural maintenance.
Habitual oral health behaviours may also be particularly beneficial for those individuals living within a low SES who are most at risk of poor oral health. For people living in poverty, a significant proportion of their cognitive capacity is thought to be utilised in managing their social situation, leaving reduced capacity for considering, implementing and/or maintaining effortful behavioural change. By establishing habitual oral health behaviours, those living in a state of chronically reduced cognitive capacity resulting from uncontrollable or complex stressors, i.e. in people from a low SES group may benefit the most, since habitual behaviour requires little or no cognitive processing. In addition, participant characteristics can influence habits and therefore it is important to determine the influence of these participant characteristics on habitual oral health behaviours.
Among the behavioural interventions which have been undertaken against a framework of habit formation theory, there are some studies looking at dental flossing in terms of a habit. In addition, implementation intention interventions have been successful in establishing increased daily flossing behaviour. Implementation intentions allow for the transfer of behavioural initiation control from self to a predetermined environmental cue via an ‘if-then’ plan.
There is also growing interest in studying tooth brushing from the theoretical perspective of habit formation. Limited, initial research has been focused towards the tooth brushing behaviour of children, with the self-reported level of habitual tooth brushing being significantly associated with the frequency of behaviour in children aged 3-6 years. There are no studies yet which explore tooth brushing habits in this way, among an adult population.
This cross sectional survey will explore adult self-reported levels of automaticity of their oral health behaviours and the influence of individual characteristics on the establishment of habitual behaviour. The ultimate aim is to inform the development of a behavioural intervention to improve the oral health behaviour of adults. It is hypothesised that this type of intervention approach would yield particular benefit in maintaining oral health behaviour over the longer term, with potential to show maximal benefit for people from low SES backgrounds.
REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/SC/0142
Date of REC Opinion
10 Mar 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion