Mākslas terapeitu digitālās kompetences nozīmīguma un īstenojamības pašnovērtējums

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a major change almost overnight when psychological support providers had to adapt technology as a primary and essential service delivery platform (Gretchen & McDonald, 2020), as art therapists conducted face-to-face sessions before the pandemic and digital competence was less of an issue than it is now. The theoretical model on which the study is based is Jelena Fantalova's (Fantalova, 201) value conflict theory, which helps to explain art therapists' self-assessment of the importance and attainability of digital competence. In the thesis, digital competence is considered as a value. The second pillar on which the theoretical model is based is the DigiComp 2.1 Citizens' Digital Competence Framework (Carretero, Vuorikari, & Punie, 2017), which divides digital competence into 5 domains with 21 skills and 8 levels of proficiency, as DigiComp provides insight into what digital competence is and what skills it consists of, from which the original questionnaire that was applied in the study and refined based on factor analysis data was also constructed and the self-assessed importance and attainability of digital competence and its differences were measured in the framework of the study. The study will apply a quantitative research design. The focus of the design is to ensure that the evidence obtained will answer the research question, meet the research aim. The study sample is 202 respondents therapists (n =47), psychologists (n = 43) and Latvian residents (n = 112) aged 22-72. The study will use the “Digital competence self-assessment survey”, instrument developed by Tatjana Bergmane and Kristine Martinsone in 2022 (Bergmane and Martinsone, 2022). The research procedure consists of two phases. The first phase is the modification of the articles and the expert evaluation - for the comprehensibility and relevance of the questionnaire. The second phase of the study is data analysis and interpretation were conducted. The main results of the study show that the survey is stable, retaining the 5 scales of the original survey (factor weights 0.42-0.847) as well as the titles of the scales. The titles are the same as in the original survey. Art therapists rated “Safety” as a very important digital competence (Mdn score 4.6, IQR between 2.09 and 5.00 on the Likert scale), while “Communication and collaboration in digital environment” was rated as a rather important digital competence (Mdn score 4.1, IQR between 1.71 and 5.00 on the Likert scale). All five scales showed statistically significant differences in importance and attainability, but the Security scale showed the highest difference (T = -5.22; p < 0.001).