Philippine E-Journals

Effects of Music Intervention on the Anxiety Problems Experienced by Sexually-Abused Preadolescent Children

Thesa Reluya Helig

Discipline: Psychology

 

Abstract:

The study utilized a two-group pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design to come up and meet the desired objective of the study which is to investigate the effects of music intervention in managing the experienced anxiety problems such as: separation anxiety, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive, panic/agoraphobia, physical injury fears, and generalized anxiety among sexually-abused preadolescent housed children in Bahay Aruga – Pasig Youth Home. The participants of this study were children rescued from sexually abusive environment with the following demographic characteristics: 8 -12 years old, female, speak Filipino language and at least knows how to understand and communicate; the subject has no prior experience of music intervention or music therapy, no hearing problems and willing to participate in the proposed study. Two groups were formed in this study, both in the experimental and control groups were all girls. Each group consisted of five respondents. The respondents were randomly assigned in the two groups. The respondents that belonged to the experimental group were 11 to 12 years of age while the respondents in the control were children 8 to 10 years of age. Both are considered in preadolescent stage. All of the subjects are housed in Bahay Aruga – Youth Home and were originally from Pasig City.  This study determined the frequency of the symptoms of the anxiety problems as well as looked into the level of anxiety by the sexually-abused 84 children whether the experienced anxiety were normal or elevated using Spence Children Anxiety Scale. The music intervention that the researcher implemented among the selected preadolescent children remarkably took an effect in decreasing the frequency of the symptoms and level of anxiety of the sample in the experimental group who have received the music intervention while in the control group the frequency and the elevated level of anxiety noted remained with the same results before and after no implementation of music intervention. An inherent limitation of the tool is that it cannot classify whether the experienced anxiety is mild, moderate, severe or panic. Another limitation of this study is the small sample size, which may affect the power to detect statistically significant differences between the two groups.