posted on 2023-08-30, 13:49authored byPhilippa Derrington
This outcome study investigates whether music therapy can improve the emotional
well-being of adolescents who are at risk of exclusion or underachievement.
Specifically, it addresses music therapy’s impact on students’ self-esteem, anxiety,
attitude towards learning, behaviour and relationships with peers.
The setting for the research was a mainstream secondary school and its federated
special school for students with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Over nineteen
months, a mixed methods design was used to observe change in students before and
after music therapy. One group received twenty, weekly, individual sessions, and the
other formed a wait-list group for comparison and then received the same treatment.
At four different times during the project quantitative data were collected from
students, teaching staff and school records, and qualitative data from semi-structured
interviews with the students before and after their period of intervention.
The study found that music therapy made a positive difference. The high level of
treatment adherence (95%) of all twenty-two students confirmed music therapy’s
appeal to this client group. The majority of teachers (58%) reported improvement in
students’ social development and attitude overall, and for some mainstream students
(56%) recognition of self-concept increased. The conviction with which students
conveyed their positive experiences of music therapy was striking.
The study supports the author’s argument for therapeutic support to be made
available at secondary schools and promotes a student-centred approach, as
exemplified in the thesis. It concludes that music therapy can be effective for youth at
risk but requires more participants in subsequent investigations for it to be proved
statistically.