Music & Dementia Care Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Music & Dementia Care - Assignment Example The first paper by Gà ¶tell, Brown & Ekman (2002) covers how caregiver singing and background music affected the verbal communications between the caregiver and the dementia patient in an urban area of Sweden. The second paper, by Hammar, Emami, Engstrà ¶m & Gà ¶tell (2011), focuses purely on music therapeutic caregiving (MTC) and the experiences that caregivers had when considering the effect of MTC on patients with dementia. One of the major similarities between the two pieces of research is that they are qualitative in nature, and thus gather information designed to provide an in-depth look at human behavior (Merriam, 2009). Many of the strengths and weaknesses of the two papers are linked to this type of data-gathering. One issue with which qualitative research struggles is that it can be difficult and expensive to involve a lot of participants, and this research is no different; Gà ¶tell, Brown & Ekman (2002) focused on nine individuals whilst Hammar (2011) focused on six. This can make the results hard to generalize to the wider population and additionally makes the results more prone to various types of bias (Merriam, 2009). However, as the aim of the research was to uncover more detail about the relationship between music-related caregiving and dementia patients, this type of result is much more informative. Gà ¶tell, Brown & Ekman (2002) collected their data in two main ways. Firstly, the morning routine of the dementia patients was recorded (6-22 minutes). Following this, the caregiver was interviewed about how the morning session had gone. Later in the day, the caregiver and the researchers would look back over the video recording of the session to allow the caregiver to give further comment on the morning routine. Using this methodology is useful because it allows the caregiver to incorporate emotions and feelings that were felt immediately after the event and logical thoughts that occurred after a period time into their responses, giving a fuller account of the effect of music on caregiving.