A serious game and negotiation skills in nursing students: A pilot study

Negotiation emerges in our lives whenever a decision needs to be made together with someone else. In the nursing field, negotiation is well represented in the relationship between the nurse and the patient. For this reason, it is important to help nurses to develop their communication skills, starting from the training period. The aims of this study were to identify the negotiation styles of nursing students with a serious game and to evaluate the effect of a tailored intervention on negotiation skills. The serious game was based on Rahim and Bonoma's theory of conflict management and included five scenarios of daily life situations. Descriptive and inferential statistics were performed to evaluate the students' negotiation styles before and after the intervention and the times spent to complete the game's scenarios. Results showed that nursing students preferred an integrating negotiation style and that they improved their compromising style after the intervention. The students were generally oriented towards using problem-solving reasoning and, after the intervention, renouncing something in order to reach a mutually acceptable decision in the included scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use a negotiation serious game in the nursing learning field and serves as an example of how technology can be accepted and integrated in education to help nursing students develop not only their technical but also relational skills.