Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

trained in Aalborg is still indigenous to a humanistic and psychodynamic tradition
(Bonde 2003), but he or she should be able to work in multi-disciplinary teams
(Bonde and Pedersen 1995) and document their work according to the principles of
evidence-based practice (Wigram 2003).
Gradually I became involved in research activities with external partners from the
medical field, and I realized that in Denmark it was (and still is) not possible to fund
even small-size clinical research on music therapy within the medical field without
including a quantitative dimension. The dominating tradition is positivist and based
on experimental research, and with the randomized controlled trial (RCT) as the ‘gold
standard’ (Robson 2002, p. 116) – also in Denmark. My reflections on the
epistemological and ontological aspects of the RCT philosophy made me realize that
if I wanted to join this type of research I not only had a lot to learn at the level of
practical skills (e.g. statistics) and methodology, I also needed to substantiate my
intuition that there was no contradiction in combining quantitative and qualitative
research strategies in one study. I have so far written three essays including my meta-
theoretical and practical reflections on this issue, all informing this dissertation in one
way or the other. The conference paper on Music Analysis and Image Potentials in
Classical Music (Bonde 1997) was my first attempt to discuss how the relationship
between music and imagery could be approached within different research paradigms.
The essay Towards a Meta-Theory of Music Therapy? An Introduction to Ken
Wilber’s “Integral Psychology” (Bonde 2001) addresses mainly the potentials and
problems of a general meta-theory of receptive music therapy within a qualitative
framework. The essay on Analyzing the music (written for the 2 nd edition of Music
Therapy Research (Wheeler, in press) and partly included in chapter 8) presents
quantitative and qualitative methods of analyzing the music as a wide spectrum of
options, thus not making a dichotomy out of the differences in ontology and
epistemology. The essay includes a discussion of when, why and how the paradigms
and the correspondent methodologies are appropriate. What is still missing is a
presentation of my ideas on how methods may be combined in one study, and what
epistemological and ontological problems this may raise.
The present study reflects my position at this point in time. In the following I will first
address the epistemological issues, the question of problems and potentials in using
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