ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some research with offenders in the community which involved the design of a sequence of simple rating scales. The rating scales were developed to assess changes in activity during a twelve-week period of group music therapy recorded on videotape. Music therapy with adult offenders has been documented and researched very little. Surveys of literature indicate that there is no directly relevant experimental or descriptive research on music therapy with adult offenders in community rehabilitation. Thus the literature indicated the following issues: extremes of behaviour, either active or passive, can be anticipated from offending clients; music therapy can have a beneficial effect on such extremes of behaviour in its capacity to stimulate or to relax. The simplicity and clarity of the measures, with their high rate of inter-observer reliability, form a very useful model for the analysis of music therapy intervention on video.
