Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

or measurable influence on the participants’ financial affairs. However, since anxiety
decreased, it might be possible that perceived financial problems lessened due to the
decrease of anxiety, in other words, the financial problems were no longer perceived
as very significant. In general, influences of BMGIM therapy on these specific
symptoms were not considered in the original hypotheses, therefore no explanation
can be offered as to whether the effects observed were caused by the therapy.
9.2.1.2 The efficacy of BMGIM on Quality of Life
The study used two different measures of QoL. In the QLQ-C30 questionnaire QoL is
addressed in two questions, and it is possible to compare scores with reference
groups. In the SOC there is no specific definition of QoL, and there are no cancer
reference groups.
In QLQ-C30, the comparison of the study participants’ mean scores with a breast
cancer reference group (fig. 5.7) showed that the study participants had a much lower
QoL pre-test score than the reference group, while at post-test it was higher than the
reference group (and even close to the normal population reference group), while at
follow-up it was close to the breast cancer reference group. This result is important
from a clinical point of view, as it supports the beneficial influence of the BMGIM
interventions as reported in Burns’ and McKinney & Clark’s studies, in the larger
perspective of reference groups. A validity issue in using QLQ-C30 to measure QoL
is that QoL is only addressed in two very broad questions, and the QoL score is
calculated as a mean of the two, one asking the participant to rate her “overall health”,
the other her “overall quality of life”. This pragmatic ‘definition’ of QoL may not
always correspond with the participants’ or the researcher’s ideas of what QoL is. An
example is ESMA who scored maximum (100) at pre-test, because she felt fine that
week, physically as well as psychologically. Thus there was no possibility of an
increase in her score, and actually it decreased slightly at post-test (and not one single
maximum score was recorded during the process).
The SOC was used in the present study to explore the influence of BMGIM on the
participants ‘sense of coherence’, understood as (an important aspect of) QoL, as
found in previous studies by Körlin and Wrangsjö (1995, 2001) In both studies the
increase of the SOC scores indicate the effectiveness of BMGIM in enhancing coping
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