Perceived Meaningfulness of Music and Participation in a Music Group among Young Adults with Physical Disabilities

Abstract

Experiences of meaning in occupation, as related to well-being, is of interest in occupational science. However, there is little research about how music contributes to perceived meaningfulness in people's daily life. The aim of this study was to investigate how young adults with physical disabilities perceive and describe meaningfulness from engaging in music and participating in a music group for leisure, at the Teletón rehabilitation centre in Chile. A qualitative approach was chosen and interviews were conducted with six participants aged between 13 and 23 years. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The findings resulted in five main categories: growing as an individual towards the future, creating a world of their own, relaxing, evoking or changing emotions and giving opportunity to express oneself, and being bound to memories and life stories. These categories were, in some respects, coherent with the described dimensions of meaningfulness in other daily occupations among different groups. However the finding pertaining to the emotional field, a dimension well known as a therapeutic factor within music therapy, is a relatively new concept in relation to meaning within occupational science.

Keywords:

• Meaning
• Music
• Young adults
• Physical disability

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the participants, parents and the staff and principal at the Teletón rehabilitation centre in Valparaiso, Chile for making this study possible. Thanks go also to Carina Tjornstrand, occupational therapist and doctoral student at Lund University Sweden for valuable discussions during the analytic process and to Geoff Dykes for his linguistic scrutiny of this article.