Musical Relationships Essay

The purpose of this study, “Musical Relationships: Caring for clients Across Settings” was to understand if there were similarities in the treatment methods in Children's Hospice and Special Education when the clients were being treated by Music Therapists. They also wanted to enlighten music therapists in the respective fields of special education and childrens hospice of applicatory procedures when their clients are preadolescent children that have a multitude of serious disabilities for the purpose of better treating the clients.

The subjects of this study were three preadolescent boys who had the same serious disabilities. The study did not depend on them having the same disabilities but also did not harm the study according to the two music therapists. These boys disabilities were severe physical limitations due to cerebral palsy, they were gastrostomy tube fed, non-verbal and non-mobile, diagnosed with global developmental delays and critical vision impairments, and suffered from seizures resulting from epilepsy. They all had had music therapy treatment for more than five years and attended special school and children's hospice. Their ages ranged from eleven to twelve as was required for the study.

The setting of the study was in Melbourne, Australia. The music therapy sessions were conducted in either the special …show more content…
One for the special school and one for the children's hospice. Shanahan was the music therapist in the special school and McFerran was the music therapist in the children's hospice. These sessions were then filmed and watched by a research assistant who analyzed the data that they saw. They watched for frequency of the dependent variables and compared them to first the time that the music therapy session took and then to each other. The research assistant then used a operating system to understand the data that was