The Effects of a Dance and Music-Based Intervention on Parkinson’s Patients’ Well-Being: An Interview Study

Abstract

Previous research has shown the positive effects of music and dance-based interventions on the physical and psychosocial symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD). The aims of this study were: (1) to investigate how PD patients subjectively perceive the emotional, cognitive, and social benefits of a music- and dance-based intervention; (2) to apply an innovative methodology for an interview analysis combining findings from a linguistic text with an analytic approach and conducted with the software LIWC and from the content analysis performed by human coders. Extensive, open-ended interviews were conducted with 13 patients with PD who had participated in a dance and music program. The interviews were analyzed using both human coders and the computer-based approach. The results show that emotional and social aspects are considered the most frequent perceived benefits of the dance program. The data confirm the positive impact of dance- and music-based programs on promoting participants’ emotional and social well-being. A combined approach to text analysis appears to be a promising way to achieve more in-depth insights into patients’ subjective perceptions.

Narratives on the present and the future in the time of COVID-19 pandemic: Uncertainty, subjective feeling and the role of positive anticipatory states

“…Thus, narratives are a major sense-making device through which we understand our own experiences; moreover, they play a central role in the construction of identity and provide the opportunity to actively participate in the social practices of a specific culture (Bruner and Bruner, 1990;Fivush et al, 1996Fivush et al, , 2012McLean, 2005;Pasupathi and Mansour, 2006). Social scientists claim that attitudes, ideas, subjective meanings, values, and selfrepresentations, as well as the way individuals look at social situations and at their role in them, may be captured in personal narratives (Baxen, 2008;Hirsh and Peterson, 2009;Iannello et al, 2018;Biassoni et al, 2019;Colombo et al, 2022). Hence, the study of autobiographical narratives offers a window into understanding the perception of the self and of subjective experience (McClean, 2007); furthermore, autobiographical narratives can be a powerful tool to help people reflect on the present and imagine the future.…”