Music therapy assessments

In this first issue of 2022, we have several articles focused on music therapy assessment tools. This is quite remarkable since, historically, music therapists have predominantly relied on assessment tools developed in other fields. While those play an important role in music therapy research and clinical practice in terms of measuring non-music outcomes (e.g. functional or psychological outcomes), it is important that music therapists develop assessment tools to assess music and music therapy-specific outcomes. Most music therapy assessment scales developed to date focus on non-music health domains such as cognition, communication, and motor skills. However, we have a growing number of music therapy assessments in which music is its “own domain of health” (Carpente & Aigen, 2015, p. 250). In these assessment scales, aspects of a client’s “musical functioning are understood broadly as reflections of one’s overall cognitive and affective relationship to the world and oneself” (Carpente & Aigen, 2015, p. 250). In 2015, the International Music Therapy Assessment Consortium (IMTAC) was founded (https://www.musictherapy.aau.dk/imtac/) to facilitate and support the development and standardization of robust and research-based music therapy assessment tools, increase awareness of assessment within and around of the field of music therapy, and promote the implementation of music therapy assessment in clinical practice. The IMTAC is a valuable music therapy assessment resource and I encourage you to help build their catalogue of music therapy assessment tools by submitting music therapy assessment tools for inclusion in this online catalogue. Collaborative efforts like this are important to advancing assessment development and implementation in our field. Another great resource for music therapy clinicians and scholars is the book on music therapy assessment by Jacobsen et al. (2018) (book review available here). The development of a standardized assessment tool is a complex process. Some of the essential steps involved include identification of the domains of the scale, item generation, ascertaining content validity, extraction of latent factors, item reduction, psychometric testing, and development of a manual that details scale administration instructions as well as scoring guidelines, just to name a few. As I assembled articles for this issue, I noticed that three of the authors included in this issue focused or are currently focusing their PhD research on the development of a music therapy assessment scale (Carpente, 2014; McDermott et al., 2015; Salokivi et al., this issue). For many years, PhD students have indeed made major contributions to the development of music therapy assessments. I decided to check in with them about their experience of undertaking such challenging research for their dissertation. In a brief e-mail exchange, Maija Salokivi, John Carpente, and Orii McDermott shared their experiences and offered some advice for future scholars undertaking this type of work. I also reached out to Wendy Magee, guest co-editor of our upcoming special issue on online NORDIC JOURNAL OF MUSIC THERAPY 2022, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 3–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/08098131.2022.2016152