Dental students’ opinions on the challenges and research opportunities: A qualitative research

BACKGROUND AND AIM: The first step to improve research in a society is a true understanding of abilities, available possibilities, and also the strengths and weakness of research projects. The purpose of this study was to survey the students’ ideas about research challenges and opportunities among dental students of Kerman, Iran.METHODS: In this qualitative action research, personal and group depth interviews with students of 3rd to 6th-year of the study were performed. The data were collected by interview and focus group discussions, and oral explanations, and ideas of interviewees were recorded. In these interviews, the questions were about the quality of research performance, the procedure of completing the plans and thesis, and research challenges and opportunities. Performed interviews were depth, unstructured, and semi-structured interviews. After recording, the interviews were written by an undergraduate dental student, and participants’ ideas were reviewed separately and coded by two researchers and continued to data saturation phase. Finally, data were analyzed and classified by content analyze, and the number of participants was specified.RESULTS: Totally, in this study, the most of research challenges and opportunities were lack of teacher’s tendency to research works, little motivation of students, not enough information and little knowledge of students about the value of research work and plans, not encouraging the students to search the subject, not training, incorrect projects about research work, lack of proper site in college, lack of research atmosphere in college, not emphasizing on research, and few number of researcher teachers. Also, no interviewee mentioned the factors such as research opportunities in dental university.CONCLUSION: Various personal, intra-institutional, extra-institutional, modality and attitude factors are barriers to research, based on the opinions of students. It should be pointed out that in this research nobody mentioned the factors like research opportunities as the barrier of research.