Research Methods in Community Music

The Library has created a large number of video tutorials that may be of help to you. Some examples include:

• Planning a literature review
• Developing a research question
• Omni tutorials

In general, when looking for previous research in music scholarship, you will be consulting and citing three formats:

journal articles

Mitchell, E. (2019). Community music therapy and participatory performance: Case study of a coffee house. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v19i1.2701

books

Silverman, M. J. (2015). Music therapy in mental health for illness management and recovery. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198735366.001.0001

book chapters

Ahonen, Heidi. (2016). Adult Trauma Work in Music Therapy. In: The Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy. Ed. Jane Edwards. Oxford University Press. 268-288. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199639755.013.47

McDonel, J. S. (2013). Exploring the relationship between music learning and mathematics learning in an interdisciplinary pre-K curriculum (see page 23)

Consider the format of research

• books, book chapters, journal articles, magazine articles, newspaper articles, data and statistics, grey literature, theses, blog/web postings, audio visual.

1. Tutorial: Developing a research question: for graduate students
2. Consider word variations and synonyms
   • think about how others might refer to your ideas
   • e.g, child death, perinatal death, neonatal death, stillbirth, sudden infant death, etc.

1. Employ search limiters (available limiters depend on the database)
   • peer reviewed, article type, date
   • e.g, in PsycInfo, can include: age group, population group, methodology
2. Identify key publications and authors
   • note citations, and cited references, repeated author names
3. Document and track everything you do in the steps above

• Tutorial: Finding books in Omni
  Tutorial: Requesting books from other libraries in Omni
• Start with known titles
  • Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, and Lee Higgins, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Community Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Search with Omni
  • limit to "Books and eBooks", e.g, "community music" 
  • use call number (e.g. to find location of Laurier's print items)
  • sign in to request from other Omni libraries
    • use Scan on Demand for chapters or articles
  • Tip: Search within ebook collections to search within the full text of eBooks (as opposed to searching titles in Omni)
    • Ebook Central (Proquest)
    • Academic Collection (ESBCO)

• Search Omni to identify books at Laurier
  • limit to "articles" and "peer-reviewed"
• Why can't I just use Google or Google Scholar?
• Choosing a Library Database
  • your topic might be interdisciplinary, so consider databases relevant to your topic. Some important ones for this course could include:
    • RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
      • contains bibliographic records of material centred on international music topics
    • CINAHL
      • contains bibliographic records of material centred on allied health topics
    • ERIC
      • contains bibliographic records of material centred on education
    • Sociology Collection
      • contains bibliographic records of material centred on sociology, social work, and social issues
    • Sometimes it is possible to search many of these databases at one time
      • Community Music @ EBSCOHost

• While the Library does not collect a lot of magazine content, some of the titles relevant to community music include
  • Music Periodicals Database
    • contains for popular and scholarly content

NOTE:

• If you already know the title of an article, you can search for it in Omni
• Finding an article when you only know the title

Use the Research Materials dropdown to see how to locate:

• Data and Statistics
• News articles (avoid having to pay for newspaper content)
• Music (streaming audio and scores)
• Videos
• Theses

Grey Literature is any literature that has not been published through traditional means, and is often excluded from large databases and other mainstream sources. Grey literature can also mean literature that is hard to find or has inconsistent or missing bibliographic information. A larger list of Grey literature sources can be found here, and below are some of the sites that might be most helpful to you for this class:

• Canadian Institutional Repositories (IR)
  • Just like Laurier's own Scholars Commons IR, most Canadian universities have their own IR, where in addition to theses they will place faculty and institutional publications. There is no tool that easily searches all IR at once, so you need to search individually.
• Google tweaks
  • Consider specific terminology with "phrases using quotation marks," or site or filetype limiters, to narrow down your Google results
    • e.g., toronto music "community programming" filetype:pdf

The best index of podcast content is

• Listen Notes

• Check for publication integrity before misconduct (Nature, Jan 7, 2020)
• The undercover academic keeping tabs on ‘predatory’ publishing (Nature, March 16, 2018)
• How Academia, Google Scholar And Predatory Publishers Help Feed Academic Fake News (Forbes, Dec 16, 2016)
• Beall's list (wikipedia page)
• Think. Check. Submit.

The Laurier Library owns print copies of the APA Style Guide, but not the electronic version. Most information you will need to guide you for this class will be found on the APA Style guide website.

Remember that the APA Style Guide is more than just information on how to cite, it is also prescribes rules about how to write. Since in this class you are reviewing anti-oppressive principals, consider the APA guidelines:

• APA Bias Free Language Guidelines