From its inception in the early 1960's, Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy has become a significant presence in the music therapy world, with hundreds of certified practitioners and six training/research centers worldwide. The research staff at our Center has pioneered the development and application of research methods to study creative and developmental processes in music therapy.

Researchers work closely with therapists in analyzing music therapy sessions to better understand the processes that make this work effective. This work has generated numerous scholarly publications and clinical training videotapes. Researchers, doctoral candidates, and master's students in the music therapy program, and more recently, the applied psychology program, have undertaken a wide range of research projects based on the study of archived video recordings of clinical sessions.

The NYU Office of Research and Doctoral Studies has awarded the Nordoff-Robbins Center a 2007 Steinhardt Art and Culture Grant for the project: "Understanding How Music Can Change Lives: Developing Outcomes Research Competency at the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy."

This grant is being used to help us take the next step in expanding our research competence to the study of the behavioral outcomes of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy in the area of autism.

We have several goals for this project, all of which will enable us to build our institutional research capacity. First, we intend to complete a thorough review of the empirical outcomes literature on autism treatments. This review of extant work would permit us to evaluate potential instruments that could be used to measure outcomes in the treatment of children with autism utilizing music therapy with a panel of interdisciplinary experts drawn from the fields of child development, autism treatment, and music therapy. This evaluation will be based on the instruments’ psychometric properties and their feasibility for use with our clinical population at the Center.

In addition, after a thorough evaluation of the literature, determination of the criteria for client inclusion, and decisions about target behaviors, we will select a battery of instruments to be used for a pilot study. The battery will include a survey questionnaire for the parents and an evaluation by the therapists.

A statistical analysis descriptive of the findings will be generated, in addition to an overall evaluation of the design and procedures. We will consider whether the instruments were effective and could be utilized in future outcomes studies at the Center.

In summary, this research will help us to better understand the current work on music therapy and autism, drawing from the empirical research and designing a pilot study that could potentially be the foundation for future research projects at the Center. Given the rise in the incidence of autism diagnoses today, this Challenge grant is extremely relevant and will help the Center develop sensitive and appropriate ways to examine the behavioral outcomes of music therapy on children with autism.