A graduate student in public health
Source text:
Early childhood caries (ECC) is defined as the presence of one or more decayed, missing (due to caries) or filled tooth surfaces in any primary tooth in a preschool-age child.
Source:
Canadian Paediatric Society Community Paediatrics Committee. (2013). Oral health care for children- A call for action. Retrieved from Canadian Paediatric Society website: http://www.cps.ca/en/documents/position/oral-health-care-for-children
Writer’s text:
Early childhood caries (ECC) refers to tooth decay in primary teeth of children between ages 0 and 6 (Canadian Paediatric Society [CPS], 2013).
Writer’s comment:
[Instead of using] “in a preschool-aged child”, I just used the actual age. Because early childhood caries will be the indicator for children’s oral health, that’s the outcome for my study. So I think it’s important to define this. The other part is that a lot of people don’t understand what “preschool-aged children”, like how old are they. Maybe for different people it means different things. Officially it should be “between ages 0 and 6”. Actually this entire paper is related to my thesis research and in my thesis research the population I’m investigating will be children aged between 0 and 6. When I’m recruiting children, I need to specify the age range. I guess in this case it not very necessary, but in my thesis, I will be specifying the age range, that’s why I included it here.
I think it is necessary for the writer to specify the age range in his/her article since this thesis would be read by many people, especially the people who are not in Canada. In different countries, it may have different definitions of the “preschool-age”. For example, the “preschool-age” child indicates a child whose age is from 3 to 6 in China, which is different from this definition. If Chinese researchers read the thesis, they may be confused about the age without the author’s citation and specific definition. Moreover, it is a topic of “Oral health care for children”, in this topic, the “The State of Oral Health in Canada – Canadian Dental Association” reported that “While children between 0-6 years are often not considered in surveillance studies, oral diseases frequently begin in the preschool years.” According to the association, the preschool children would be those between 0-6 years. In other research topics, the definition of the “preschool-age” may have other meanings. For these reasons, I think I would do the same citation and definition to help people gain a clear understand of the thesis if I were the student. (A graduate in Education)