Synthesis Sunday: Selecting Articles

Welcome to the newly titled "Synthesis Sunday" series here at musictxandme (through www.musictherapyworks.com). I intend to make this a time to focus on something that is woefully lacking in my life - the research to practice connection.

Let me explain.

It is wonderful that we have all these researchers who are investigating all sorts of questions about music, therapy, and humans, but I often feel that those questions are not relevant to what I do with those three things - music, therapy, and humans - on a daily basis. I have difficulty including information from research projects into my interactions in the music therapy clinic. I think this stems from several places...

1. Research tends to focus on generalities, ESPECIALLY when it comes to specific music, music therapy techniques, or the therapeutic music experiences that are used in the research process. An article may include a list of musical pieces that are used in the process of interacting with clients, but there is often no reference to the music used in sessions at all. That makes replication somewhat difficult for me as a hands-on clinician.
2. Most of the time, research questions are lofty. The researchers seek to answer some of the big questions of music therapy. I am seeking things that are less lofty. I want to know whether a tempo of 88 bpm will be more effective than a tempo of 100 bpm with my clientele during our work on bilateral gross motor coordination, specifically focusing on crossing the midline. I am not as interested in philosophical or technique studies that offer interesting information but do not have much to do with the clients that I serve.
3. There are times when the conditions that are researched are far removed from the situations that I find myself in daily.

I'm just saying.

I know that there is information out there that is relevant to my clinical practice, and I need to focus on this as a part of my professional development, so this is why the change for my Sunday focus.

I'm going to be selecting some articles to review over the next several months - things that may or may not offer some of the information that I seek from our research publications. So, today is a description of how I will be selecting articles to read and parse and digest into my music therapy system.

STEP ONE: Keywords
To start off any sort of effective literature search, it makes sense to know what you are seeking. Time to start brainstorming!!

I work with children and adolescents with developmental diagnoses and chronic psychiatric concerns that manifest in aggressive behavioral responses. My primary clinical goals tend to be psychosocial in nature, and I have to treat my clients within a large group service delivery model where I have limited ability to choose specific clients for specific services - I have to see them all grouped together. The primary treatment focus at my facility is behavioral, so while I am interested in other foci, the likelihood of being able to implement other types of interactions are slim. The types of questions that I have tend to be more neurological in nature than philosophical - more, "why does this tempo work for this client and this tempo doesn't?" than "what is the best iPad program to use in sessions?"

STEP TWO: Start the search.
I now have a list of key concepts to start to search through. I will need to think of all the different labels for all of these concepts. For example, are there other terms for children and adolescents? Are there other terms for the common diagnoses that my students carry with them? Have those terms changed in the past several years? If so, what was the prior term?

I have the benefit of using research from any era of music therapy in this project, and I feel that it is important to investigate research questions from both a historical and current perspective. There are lots of clinical nuggets of information in research that is older than 15 years back. It makes sense to look throughout the history for this particular project - but not as important when doing contemporary research for schooling purposes.

So, my next stop is on the AMTA member site to search through the research articles for any and all of my search terms. Now, in complete honesty, I haven't done this yet because I have found an article from the most recent Music Therapy Perspectives that I am going to start with, so this step will wait until after I finish this particular article.

More on that next week. For the moment, I am going to get my research-informed clinician sheet, post-its, and reading glasses ready and start reading my current article focus.

See you next Sunday? Hope so!