ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1629482
Virtual simulations to address cultural responsiveness of nutrition and dietetic students: A feasibility study
Provisionally accepted
- University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
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Virtual simulations have been used in various healthcare fields to enhance knowledge and technical skills. Few focus on enhancing personal skills like cultural responsiveness. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of using virtual simulations to enhance cultural responsiveness among nutrition and dietetic undergraduate students. Two virtual simulations were developed using Dialogflow and Synthesia software. Both simulations had virtual agents who had chronic kidney disease and another chronic condition and were considered diverse -financial status, age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Content matter experts reviewed the scenarios and potential questions that a student would ask and the responses for accuracy and relevance. Nutrition and dietetic undergraduate students (n=55) completed a 5-item open-ended survey regarding ease, difficulty, likes, dislikes, improvements of the simulations, and a closed ended question on a 5-point Likert scale towards agreement with cultural responsiveness. NVivo v14 was used to analyze the transcripts from the interaction with the agents and the responses from the survey using conceptual content analysis. Participants indicated that the two simulations were easy to use. Some difficulties identified were the inability to get a response from the agents. From the transcript analysis, the main themes that participants asked the virtual agents were focused on lifestyle, eating habits, finances, and general medical. Participants (72%) agreed/strongly agreed that their cultural responsiveness improved. Virtual simulations may be a method to enhance cultural responsiveness. Further research should be conducted to determine if these virtual simulations help students apply cultural responsiveness when working with clients.
Keywords: virtual simulations, cultural responsiveness, Dietetic students, higher education, feasibility
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hunter, Hazim, Lok and Andrade. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jeanette Mary Andrade, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
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