Assessment of Different Personality Traits Amongst Dental Interns and First-year Undergraduate Students: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Personality traits are stable patterns of cognition, emotion, motivation and behaviour that individuals display across various situations. Performance in medical and dental education requires a range of personality traits; therefore, understanding human behaviour and individual differences necessitates an understanding of these traits. Research on the personalities of medical students and those in training programmes for other health professions has revealed certain traits that are linked to academic and clinical success throughout the educational process. Aim: To assess the different personality traits amongst dental interns and first-year undergraduate students. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Department of Paediatric and Preventive Dentistry, I.T.S. Dental College, Hospital and Research Centre, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, from March 2024 to June 2024. The study included 206 participants, comprising 98 interns and 108 first-year students. A Big Five Personality Test (BFPT) questionnaire consisting of 44 questions was distributed via Google Forms through mail and WhatsApp to the participants. The questionnaire focused on five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. The normality of the data was tested by the Shapiro-Wilk test and was found to be normally distributed. The significance of the differences in means of parameters between the two groups was tested using an independent t-test, with a significance level set at p