ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the initial stages of a study to investigate the strategies used by a music therapist working with cerebral palsied children. The Basic Structure, then, was a musical artefact based on a classic Schenkerian Ursatz or ground plan: tonic, dominant and back to tonic. The pragmatic route transfers known techniques of measurement and analysis that have proved interesting in other areas such as psychotherapy process research. Unfortunately most measures of psychological state used in psychotherapy research are verbally based, e.g. interpersonal process recall and are therefore inaccessible to our children. L. Greenberg describes an alternative: a ‘paradigm shift in the world of psychotherapy research toward the study of sequentially patterned change episodes’. Greenberg also suggests that process research should make explicit the implicit map of the experienced clinician, select and describe the task environment, make rational and empirical analyses of performance of tasks and compare actual and possible performances.
