by meganandphd » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:43 pm
Interesting topic, however, the design of your survey is extremely poor by research standards, so I hope that you are just collecting this data for your own interest and not for an educational (or professional) project.
In my experience, people with diagnoses closer to Autism in the complete spectrum are extremely sensitive to "over-stimulating" types of music, e.g. loud, distorted, complex, dissonant harmonies and the like, but do enjoy simple, repetitive melody lines that they can learn and repeat. On the other hand, some individual's closer to the Asperger's side seem to have a gift for music and prefer complex harmonies and orchestral movements.
Personally, I was a bit concerned that you used music categories that were artificially created by radio marketing executives (to create personal identification among the masses with a certain "type" of music in order to more directly "target" demographic markets for advertisers) as an IV. If you are truely interested in collecting data regarding musical preferences for people with mental impairments in the Autistic Spectrum, then I would recommend dividing music preference into categories dependent on the ACTUAL fundementals of music, i.e. the time signature, the key, the amount and types of harmonies used, the amount and types of instruments used, etc. Later, as a post hoc analysis, you could describe how the various combinations of these fundementals results in different types of music "categories".
And, on a personal level, I have to point out that you did not include NEARLY enough "types of music" on your list. The main types of music I love were not included at all, and I'm a person that LOVES music SO much that I spend MOST of my entertainment dollar on traveling across country to attend concerts and music festivals.