Perspectives on Perspective: Exploring the impact of therapist perspective on client experience in music therapy (working title)

With this PhD project, I seek to explore the impact of perspective in and on music therapy clinical practice and pedagogy, with particular emphasis given to the impact of perspective on the ways in which the personhood of disabled therapy participants is understood and realized. Article 1 (Devlin & Meadows, 2023) compared two perspectives undertaken in music therapy assessment and treatment planning (e.g., decision-making and case formulation), with emphasis given to the ways in which each perspective considers— or does not consider—context, power, identity, and collaboration. Article 2 (Devlin et al., under review) explored my (Kerry’s) experiences teaching these two perspectives to undergraduate music therapy students in a course centered on clinical practice with disabled children in the United States, and how the process of learning to take on different perspectives impacted the students’ personal, musical, and professional development. Article 3 aims to explore the impact of therapist perspective on client experience in music therapy by giving voice to the lived experiences and perspectives of a disabled client themselves, along with the parallel perspective and experiences of the client’s parent, and Kerry, their former music therapist. Through this co-researcher collaboration, client (a disabled middle schooler), parent, and music therapist (also disabled) will uncover the dynamics of the assessment and treatment process, focusing on questions such as “Who decides the goals of therapy?”, “Who decides what happens in therapy sessions?” and “How can power and equity be addressed in therapy with disabled clients?”