Music therapy with young people who have profound intellectual and developmental disability: Four case studies exploring communication and engagement within musical interactions

Abstract

Background The impact of music therapy on the communicative behaviours of young people with profound intellectual and developmental disability has not yet been established. Method Four adolescents participated in individual music therapy (MT) and toy play sessions with the same therapist in a 6-month period. Sessions were video-recorded and analysed based on The Inventory of Potentially Communicative Acts (Sigafoos, J., Arthur-Kelly, M., & Butterfield, N. (2006). Enhancing everyday communication for children with disabilities. Baltimore, MA: Brookes) to compare the communicative behaviours within each condition. Results Both conditions successfully engaged the young people, with slightly more communicative behaviours observed in MT in response to singing, and more rejecting behaviours in toy play. MT was therefore considered equivalent to toy play in terms of quantity, but distinctive in eliciting more mutually enjoyable interpersonal encounters. Conclusion MT creates engaging and motivating conditions for interactions with others, which suggests the need for greater integration of music therapy into special education classrooms.

(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior

“…We did this in order to maximize the impact of the ball in this study for this varying target group. This tailoring to the preferences and capabilities of the user is important for activities for people with profound intellectual disabilities, and has been suggested for visits to multi-sensory rooms [72] and music therapy [248]. The pilot sessions in Chapter 7 also confirmed the advice to adapt to both preferences and capabilities of the participants.…”

“…We created an interactive ball to address some goals that were set out regarding alertness, shown affect, and amount of movement. I explained the difficulties inherent in doing research with such a user group: doing research on interventions for people with PIMD leads to profound methodological challenges due to the small number of people with homogeneous conditions, fluctuating health differences, contextual differences, and the longer treatment time that is required [248]. I showed that there were large differences in the responses to the ball, three of our nine participants included in the ten sessions showed positive effects on one or more of the targeted measures.…”

“…Doing research on interventions for people with Profound Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities can lead to profound methodological challenges due to the small number of people with homogeneous conditions, fluctuating health differences, contextual differences, and the longer treatment time that is required [248]. Especially if new interventions are researched on a possible health related effect, additional care should be taken in the research design, and in interpretation of the results.…”

“…Brodin and Renblad also explain that some complicated ethical considerations arise for doing research with people with cognitive disabilities [40]. Many studies investigating PIMD include a limited number of participants, and tend to perform use case studies to compare an intervention to some baseline intervention [90,138,248]. Building on the findings of Chapter 7 and this related work, we used an A-B-A design with multiple measurements of the same individual in two conditions, and did this for 9 participants, see Figure 8.1.…”

“…Only in Part II were some short tunes (instead of shorter sounds) played and in Part III during some of the gait rehabilitation games music was played in the background. We know that for some people with profound intellectual and developmental disabilities music therapy can lead to enjoyable interpersonal encounters [248]. We also know that music can be applied in games in such a way that it changes if the game intensifies [131].…”