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Supportive Care in Cancer

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01-09-2009 | Original Article

Resounding attachment: cancer inpatients’ song lyrics for their children in music therapy

Authors: Clare O’Callaghan, Emma O’Brien, Lucanne Magill, Elizabeth Ballinger

Published in: Supportive Care in Cancer | Issue 9/2009

Abstract

Goals of work

Scant attention focuses on supporting parent–child communication during the parents’ cancer hospitalizations. Parents may struggle to remain emotionally available. Caregiver absences may threaten secure attachment relationships with infants and elicit problems amongst older children. Music therapists help many parents with cancer to compose songs for their children. Their lyric analysis may provide insight into song writing’s communicative and therapeutic potential.

Materials and methods

Two song lyric groups were comparatively analyzed (based on grounded theory). One group included 19 songs written by 12 patients with the first author. Another included 16 songs written by 15 patients with three music therapists (including two authors), which were previously published or recorded for the public. Songs were composed by 20 mothers and seven fathers for at least 46 offspring. All parents had hematological or metastatic diseases. Qualitative inter-rater reliability was integrated.

Main results

Comparable lyrical ideas in the two parent song groups included: love; memories; yearning for children; metaphysical presence (now and afterlife); loss and grief; the meaning and helpfulness of the children in their lives; hopes for and compliments about their children; encouragement; requests; personal reflections; existential beliefs; and suggestions about to whom the children can turn.

Conclusions

Parents’ song lyric messages may support their children during the parents’ illnesses and through the children’s developmental transitions and possible bereavement. Some parents use song writing for catharsis and to encourage their children’s continuing attachment with them after death. Through promoting parent–child connectedness and emotional expression, therapeutic song writing can be a valuable oncologic supportive care modality.

O’Brien’s recordings [32] and Dileo and Magill’s work [11, 33] indicate a broad range of musical genres incorporated into the patient songs.

Grounded theory evidently informs this research through the inductive, iterative, and comparative analysis of multiple data sources pertaining to the phenomenon of hospitalized parents with cancer writing songs for their children. Grounded theory encompasses three levels of theory development: substantive, middle range, and formal, and these theoretical levels represent decreasing levels of specificity to a group and/or place. To develop a grounded theory, one theoretically samples data until saturation is reached [34]. It was hoped that the available songs for analysis would enable saturation sufficient for a substantive grounded theory about ideas in songs written by future hospitalized parents with cancer experiencing comparable song writing procedures. However, even if saturation is not reached, this research will provide a foundation for others to analyze songs written in comparable contexts and compare their lyrics with these findings. In this way, therapist-researchers can conduct multisite studies on interpretative phenomena pertaining to their clinical practices and gradually develop grounded theories about those phenomena.

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Title: Resounding attachment: cancer inpatients’ song lyrics for their children in music therapy
Authors: Clare O’Callaghan
Emma O’Brien
Lucanne Magill
Elizabeth Ballinger
Publication date: 01-09-2009
Publisher: Springer-Verlag
Published in: Supportive Care in Cancer / Issue 9/2009
Print ISSN: 0941-4355
Electronic ISSN: 1433-7339
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-008-0555-5

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Abstract

Goals of work

Materials and methods

Main results

Conclusions

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