Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

addressed further here 48 , but the stance of the present author is that it is more
productive to let the research questions determine the methodology and even
paradigm than the other way round. The choice of methodology always include
epistemological, axiological and ontological dilemma. I have addressed some of these
dilemmas in this section; others will follow in the discussion chapter.
What follows is a description of the participants (4.2), the clinical setting, therapeutic
procedures and materials (4.3), the designs of the quantitative and the qualitative
investigations (4.4), the hypotheses, data material and methods of analysis in the
quantitative investigation (4.5), and assumptions, data material and methods of
analysis in the qualitative investigation (4.6).
4.2 Participants
The subjects recruited for this study were six women diagnosed with cancer. Table
4.1 includes basic information on the participants (more elaborate descriptions of the
participants can be found in Appendix 4.1).
48 I may refer the reader to a very interesting and relevant discussion highlighting the basic
epistemological and ontological dilemmas in music therapy research. The Nordic Journal of Music
Therapy hosted a discussion forum on Ken Bruscia’s Improvisational Assessment Profiles in 2001-02
(http://www.hisf.no/njmt/forumiap.html), including a discussion of the use of the IAPs in quantitative
and qualitative research. In his final response to the forum discussion Bruscia (2002) states that ”the
IAPs can be used in both quantitative and qualitaive paradigms, and I support both approaches.”
(Bruscia 2002, p. 79) However the use of the IAPs within the two paradigms pose different
epistemological and axiological dilemmas (e.g. operational definitions of the ’improvisatory event’ in
quantitative research and description versus interpretation in qualitative research.)
128