College Students’ and Campus Counselors’ Attitudes Toward Teletherapy and Adopting Virtual Reality (Preliminary Exploration) for Campus Counseling Services

This work-in-progress explores factors that impact the attitudes towards existing modes of teletherapy and a preliminary exploration of attitudes toward virtual reality teletherapy (VRT) adoption for teletherapy on college campuses. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with 3 students and 2 campus counselors. Thus far, 3 primary themes (physical, social, and clinical factors), 8 secondary sub-themes, and 9 tertiary sub-themes are identified in influencing participants’ attitudes of counseling modalities including their initial attitudes toward adopting VR for remote counseling services. These insights suggest that VRT may be more openly adopted for improved access to campus counseling services and for specific clinical use cases where students can translate learned skills to the real world. Concerns of VRT include students using VR to support antithetical behavior and establishing trust between users in a VR environment.