Avaa tiedosto - Doria

stimulating musical environment is essential and highly significant for the
development of children's musicality.
The study sample consists of seven toddler’s groups in different parts of Swedish
Finland. The children in the groups were between 11 months and 3 years 11
months old, and on average, there are 13 children per group. The study, therefore,
involves more than 90 children. When the day nurseries were contacted,
respect was promised for staff preferences as regards the appropriate days and
times for video recording. Nothing was rearranged or changed in the daily programmes
and routines for the sake of data collection. I videotape the approximately
15-minute long musical sessions in the mornings and in addition to that, I
added an environment with instruments, which two or three children at a time
could visit either in the morning or in afternoon. Eight of the educators who had
responsibility for the music sessions in the seven toddler’s groups were women
and there was one man.
The methodological approach is of great importance for the method chosen for
this data collection and the means by which the collected data set is analyzed
and interpreted. The hermeneutic and also partly the video graphic approach in
this study affect the reflections that were made. Participants in the survey are
studied and their behaviour, i.e. what they say, how they move and how they
interact and use the objects around them, analysed and interpreted by me. This
leads to an enhanced understanding of the musical learning environment. This
study involves understanding, a comprehensive understanding in which " the
parts express the whole and the whole its parts" according to hermeneutical principles
(cf. Ödman, 2007).
Since the video-recorded material can be heard an unlimited number of times, it
is possible to focus on nine different dimensions of the musical learning environment
in this observation. This is important in order to gain a deeper level of
understanding of the musical learning environment, as variations of the research
problems different dimensions can be studied simultaneously. Other methods of
observation techniques rather than the video observation would not be able to
offer these possibilities; this supports the choice of method for the data collection.
Bae describes, in Pettersen (1994), that one of the greatest challenges with
regard to analysis of video material is the interpretation of the video observations.
She denotes here that a video sequence is not "truth" as a video sequence
must be "read", for example, a researcher must obtain something from it.
Furthermore, she believes that many fail because it is difficult to interpret a
video observation. The interpretation is specifically dependent on what the observer
sees with his/ her eyes. She also believes that it is important what the
observer directs his/ her attention towards, as well as the background and education
of the interpreter. Bjorklund (2010, p. 25) considers that the videograph
supports Ödman’s existential hermeneutics which "endeavours to understand the
phenomena in the context they exist and occur is of importance." The researcher
seeks to describe the world the children encounter. However, he or she has,
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