Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

9. Discussion
“..Where the mind is there is the treasure”
(The gospel of Maria Magdalene)
This study was based on the research questions presented in chapter 4. The three first
sub-questions were addressed by a quantitative investigation with fixed design,
including 10 hypotheses, while the last four sub-questions were addressed by a
qualitative investigation with flexible design. The formulation of the first three
questions and the ten hypotheses remained the same during the research process,
following the tradition of fixed design research. In research based on flexible design
research questions serve more as guidelines for the process, and the actual wording of
the questions may be revised to reflect changes in the researcher’s ongoing process of
understanding and reflection, including the identification of biased assumptions and
results of the triangulation procedures used to enhance the validity of the study. These
revisions will all be comprehensively addressed in this discussion.
The study involved the collection of data from different sources: self report
questionnaires, audio recordings, interviews with participants, session transcripts,
therapist’s session notes, and music analyses. Thus, the study is not only based on
multiple methods, but also on triangulation. Three types of triangulation are included:
Data triangulation, methodological and theoretical triangulation (Robson 2002). The
fourth triangulation type, observer triangulation, was not used systematically.
However, material from independent observers was included in the heuristic music
analysis. Two potential data sources (Mandala drawings and therapist interviews)
originally intended to be included in the study have been discarded due to the total
amount of the data. These mandala drawings of the participants and two interviews
with the therapist will therefore not be processed in this study. However, problems
and consequences arising out of this decision will be addressed.
The discussion chapter is structured in the following way. A summary of the results of
the study is given in section 9.1, including results of both the quantitative and the
qualitative investigation. In section 9.2 the findings are discussed and related to the
theoretical base knowledge presented in the literature reviews of chapters 2 and 3.
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