Scholarly Critique

Exercise 11

• Scholarly critique

Journey without a map: Dance Therapy with dementia patients - Scholarly Critique

Heather Hill’s article outlined her journey into the realm of research by planning and carrying out a study to “investigate improvement in the level of involvement in the activity and social interaction of psycho-geriatric patients during a series of dance therapy sessions” (Hill, 1992). She explained the difficulty in finding relevant literature as so little had been written on dance therapy and work with geriatric populations. Her methodology was mainly influenced by positivist and phenomenological ideas. This means that initial plans to observe and measure movements that represented interaction with others (positivist approach) were supplemented with a process journal and observations of others and noting feeling responses of the patients (phenomenological approach). While this article does not give definitive conclusions, due partly to the timing of its publishing, before complete analysis of the data, it does conclude that there is reason to believe that dance therapy does have a positive effect on patient movement responses.

This article was published in a book called ‘How the arts make a difference in therapy’ published by the Australian Dance Council. It was clearly aimed at practitioners and not highly academic readers. The level of detail about the special group of people involved suggested that this piece of writing was aimed at people who were familiar with the population group but not necessarily with the approaches of dance therapy. The writing style was quite relaxed and informal, although the content covered all sections of a more formal piece of research. The article was laid out in a logical manner and use of headings and formatting added to its clarity.

While the study was about the effect of dance therapy on dementia patients in a hospital where the author worked, much of this paper focused on the journey of the author to find the most appropriate methodology and approaches for this type of research and justifying that methodology for her study. She appropriately referenced with APA sporadically through the article, and so it didn’t surprise me when, upon reviewing the reference list, I found only a short list of six references. This could suggest to a reader that the article is not well grounded in the literature. However the methodology chosen seemed an appropriate choice and I agreed with the conclusions of the author. The author was transparent in explaining potential areas of weakness, e.g. the assumption that there is a connection between physical and mental events and that further analysis of the data was required.

I appreciated and enjoyed the less formal writing style but can see how it may have alienated some readers who may not credit this type of writing with validity or consider it appropriate. In view of this point, the author noted that this piece of writing was not the only writing she had or would complete related to the study, but that she would write a number of other reports and give presentations that would be aimed at different audiences and levels. It is possible that these reports might be a more acceptable format and style.

Overall I appreciated the article and felt it was quite a strong piece of work; however I was left with a few questions. One of these questions was around why so few moments in the sessions were observed for data collection and how these minutes were chosen. For each participant, one minute was chosen from each 15 min block of the 45 min recorded session. This was done in 3 different sessions at the beginning, middle and end of the series of sessions. The reason for this wasn’t explained, and from my inexperienced point of view it would seem that significant movement could have been seen in minutes before and after the chosen minute that may have significantly changed the results.

As a proponent of accessibly languaged academic writing I take courage from this article and hope to do at least as well in my own research paper.