The effect of intercultural sensitivity and ethnocentrism on health tourism awareness level in nurses: Analysis with machine learning approach

Abstract

Purpose: In this study, the effects of intercultural sensitivity and ethnocentrism on health tourism awareness levels in nurses were examined. Design and methods: This quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted in Turkey between November 2022 and March 2023. Intercultural sensitivity scale, ethnocentrism scale, and health tourism awareness scale were used to collect the data. R programming language 4.1.3, G*Power 3.1 and SPSS-22 program were used in the analysis of the study. Results: This study was conducted with 386 nurses. Intercultural sensitivity has a positive and significant effect on health tourism awareness levels (& beta; = 0.141; t(384) = 2.784, p = 0.006). Ethnocentrism has a positive and sig-nificant effect on health tourism awareness levels (& beta; = 0.184; t(384) = 3.659, p = 0.001). Random Forest regression was found to be the best performing algorithm among the machine learning algorithms for predicting the Health Tourism Awareness variable. Looking at the contributions of the variables to the model, according to the SHAP value (Shapley Additive Explanations), it was seen that the most important variable that should be in the model to predict the health tourism awareness variable is the ethnocentrism variable. Conclusion: It was determined that as the level of intercultural sensitivity and ethnocentrism of nurses increased, their awareness of health tourism increased. Longitudinal studies on health tourism awareness in nurses are recommended.