1. Willingness of dentists to treat HIV or Hepatitis-B patients
Consultant:
Chongyi Shen
Chu-Yu Chung

2. Study Goal
The relationship between willingness of dentists in the West Bank Area to treat the HIV or HBV patients and their characteristics
Raise people’s and essentially dentists’ awareness to accept all of types of patients without discrimination, for otherwise fewer and fewer patients will tell their true disease condition if they don’t get treated, which may cause serious consequences

3. Data Collection Method: Phone calls to registered dentists
Response Variable
- 5~6 students conduct the phone interview
- Caller call the dentist and pretend to have either AIDS or Hepatitis (randomly selected) and ask, ”Will you treat me?”
- Some dentists would refuse (0); some would agree (1)

4. Data Collection Method: Phone calls to registered dentists
Covariate Variables
- the dentists’ characteristic (gender, place of work, etc.) is on a list readily to obtain

5. Data Collection Area: Nine major cities in the West Bank Area
- the eastern part of the
Palestinian territories on
the west bank of the River
Jordan in the Middle East

6. North
Center
South

7. Independent Variables
Gender of the dentist
Year of graduation
-’ ’
-’ ’
-’ ’
-’2000+’

8. Independent Variables
Dental Specialty
- General practitioners
- Oral Surgeons
- Other specialities
Area of graduation
-Palestine
-Arab countries
-Western countries
-Eastern countries

9. Independent Variables
Place of Work
-Northern part of the West bank
-Middle part of the West bank
-South part of the West bank
Gender of caller
Disease that the caller claimed to have
- AIDS
- Hepatitis B

10. Response Variable The willingness of the dentist to treat that patient
- Accept
- Decline

11. Logistics Regression Significant variables - Gender of dentists
- Area of graduation
- Place of work
- Type of disease

12. Things that can be improved
‘Block’ on caller ; some caller may just be nicer than the others and tends to have a higher ‘acceptance rate’
Information might be missing when use categorical variables; for instance, for the year of graduation, it might be better to use the actual year that the dentist graduated instead of the period they graduated.