Characterization of social skills in dentistry students as social competence

Abstract

When a person has social skills and puts them in a specific context to solve specific problems in their relationship with others, it is said that they have sufficient social competence to achieve their goals and objectives without prejudice to their peers. The school is one of the most relevant areas for the social development of people and, therefore, to promote and teach relationship skills. The professional practice of the dentist, given its characteristics, implies that social skills are permanently put into play to be able to interact with patients, mainly, and thus achieve mutually beneficial relationships. Hence, the objective of the present study was to identify the Social Skills possessed by the students of the Dentist Surgeon Career, of the School of Higher Studies Zaragoza, UNAM. To this end, a descriptive, observational, cross-sectional and prolective study was carried out, in which an Instrument for the Evaluation of Social Skills in University Students was applied to 200 dental students, finding that the skills with the highest percentages of this population were: empathy and decision making, and those that presented the lowest percentages, creative thinking and critical thinking.