Shifting social perceptions of dietitians in Korea after the legislation of nutrition teachers: a keyword network analysis of unstructured data.

Objectives: In Korea, dietitian licenses began to be issued in 1964, and they have been working to prevent diseases and promote people's health in various fields according to the times. This study was conducted to compare differences in social perception of dietitian over time by collecting online unstructured data and analyzing the frequency and network structure of nutritionist-related keywords after the deployment of nutrition teachers began.

Methods: Using 'dietitian' as a keyword, we collected data from NAVER's web, blogs, and news provided by Textom (2024, The IMC) and refined the data. We investigated the frequency ranking of keywords related to dietitians for each period, revealed the network structure using UCINET6 (Freeman) and Netdraw, and clustered similar concepts among keywords through CONCOR (CONvergence of iterated CORrelations) analysis to cluster-related concepts.

Results: Frequency analysis revealed that during the first period, keywords such as 'School' and 'Education' reflecting the institutionalization of nutrition teachers, were highly ranked. However, by the second period, these terms had dropped out of the top 10. Meanwhile, keywords related to healthcare, such as 'Hospital', consistently remained among the most prominent. In the second period, the rankings of the 'License' and 'University transfer' keywords increased significantly. Centrality analysis showed stronger connectivity between dietitians and keywords such as 'Food', 'School', 'Examination', and 'Nutrition' in the second period compared to the first. CONCOR analysis further demonstrated that the 'Major education' cluster of the first period was differentiated into the 'Major education and qualification' and 'Professional competency certification process' clusters of the second period. In addition, the 'Health and welfare' cluster of the first period was divided into the 'Health and welfare regional service' clusters of the second period.

Conclusion: The results of this study will be used as basic data for identifying social perception and trends in the dietitian profession, further providing a scope for their improvement.