Erik Jansen

Co-designing collaboration: Using a partnership framework for shared policymaking in geriatric networks:

Involving older people in policymaking is an emerging trend. In the literature no studies were found on the macro-level development of partnerships between older people and professionals in healthcare policy. The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of a partnership framework as part of action research (AR) for facilitating user involvement and collaborations in policymaking. We present a study in which older people became partners in eight regional geriatric research networks, as part of a national program to innovate elderly care. A partnership framework, consisting of conditions, actions, relations, and values, structured the AR study. In the study older people’s delegates and professionals co-designed this partnership framework by first separately deliberating in homogeneous meetings, followed by heterogeneous dialogue. In regional workshops this model was used to reflect on local partnership relations and to identify actions for implementation. Findings reveal that the partnership framework offered a structure to facilitate user involvement and the development of partnerships in the regional geriatric policy networks. We conclude that co-designing partnerships with the help of our framework is a useful approach to facilitate collaborative policymaking processes. Co-designing partnership may also be helpful in other AR studies.

Study Protocol RapMusicTherapy for emotion regulation in a school setting

The growing risk of the development of problem behaviors in adolescents (ages 10–15) requires effective methods for prevention, supporting self-regulative capacities. Music listening as an effective self-regulative tool for emotions and behavioral adaptation for adolescents and youth is widely studied. However, music therapy enhancing the development of emotion regulation skills in schools is rare. The application of rap in clinical cases of music therapy appears to have a beneficial regulative effect on this population. The aim of this study is to investigate the performance of RapMusicTherapy (RMT) in a non-clinical, school-based program to support self-regulative abilities for well-being and to reduce the risk of low grades attributable to troubled mental health at an early stage. All adolescents in Grade 8 of a public school will be invited to participate, and randomly assigned, either to RMT or to regular classes. RMT will be applied once a week during 4 months. After obtaining written informed consent by parents, measurements will take place at baseline (start of study), after 4 months (end of RMT) and again after 4 months without RMT (follow-up). Primary outcome data include measures of psychological well-being, emotion regulation, self-esteem, self-description, language development, executive functioning and the rest–activity rhythm. Secondary outcome data consist of subjective experiences of participants, collected in follow-up interviews with experimental group respondents. RMT is developed for application in school-based settings. This is the first study to focus on RMT as an intervention for emotion regulation in order to evaluate the effects of rap on the self-regulative capacities of adolescents, in support of their well-being. This study protocol aims to outline the method and procedures involved, and to increase attention and awareness of the potential for collaborations involving music, therapy and education for future investigations.

“Being a bully isn’t very cool…”: Rap & Sing Music Therapy for enhanced emotional self-regulation in an adolescent school setting – a randomized controlled trial:

Music as an effective self-regulative tool for emotions and behavioural adaptation for adolescents might enhance emotion-related skills when applied as a therapeutic school intervention. This study investigated Rap & Sing Music Therapy in a school-based programme, to support self-regulative abilities for well-being. One-hundred-and-ninety adolescents in grade 8 of a public school in the Netherlands were randomly assigned to an experimental group involving Rap & Sing Music Therapy or a control group. Both interventions were applied to six classes once a week during four months. Measurements at baseline and again after four months provided outcome data of adolescents’ psychological well-being, self-description, self-esteem and emotion regulation. Significant differences between groups on the SDQ teacher test indicated a stabilized Rap & Sing Music Therapy group, as opposed to increased problems in the control group (p = .001; ηp2 = .132). Total problem scores of all tests indicated significant improvements in the Rap & Sing Music Therapy group. The RCT results imply overall benefits of Rap & Sing Music Therapy in a school setting. There were improved effects on all measures – as they are in line with school interventions of motivational engagement in behavioural, emotional and social themes – a promising result.

Complexity and musical improvisationCobussenM. (2017). The field of musical improvisation. Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press. Open-access. Retrieved from https://www.lup.nl/product/field-musical-improvisation/

Whereas in popular belief improvisation may be viewed as ad hoc or opportunistic action, improvising musicians know better: it requires years of training and thorough preparation to deliver a good or top performance on the spot. Moreover, it is their highly developed proficiency that also allows score-performing musicians to subtly solve playing errors without listeners even noticing. Whereas improvisation has received relatively little attention in musicology because of the predominant focus on written scores, more and more scholars are delving into the subject, often also from the insider’s perspective of the improvising musicians themselves. What arises is an image of musical improvisation as involving complex creative and social processes that also may inform other domains than musical practice. The topic of The field of musical improvisation, an openaccess monograph by Marcel Cobussen, is musical improvisation as an integrated and complex artistic and creative collection of practices that warrant analysis from both the social sciences and the humanities. The book’s open-access nature allows it to be read from a screen providing clickable examples of musical and video resources illustrating the author’s arguments. Thus, the text can be treated in the typical non-linear and rhizomatic stance that characterises internet browsing. Moreover, the author deliberately presents most chapters as lemmas rather than in a straightforwardly organised line of argument. Thus, Cobussen invites us to improvise through his conceptual field of improvisation rather than taking us by the hand along the way. Cobussen’s main objective is to “reposition improvisation within the worlds of music and sound, to make unusual connections between music and various scholarly disciplines, to rethink several concrete improvisation practices, and to extend and emphasize the significance of improvisation beyond the domain of music – all this in order to enrich the already existing discourse on musical improvisation” (p. 13). Consequently, he invites the reader to follow philosopher Gilles Deleuze by asking “does it work?” or “does it matter?” instead of “what is it?” as an aesthetic pragmatist account of musical improvisation to thereby bridge the traditional divide between the social sciences and the humanities. Cobussen’s argument is organised into four parts. Part 1 (entitled “Marking”) deals with the author’s points of departure in thinking about improvisation and legitimising its study as a phenomenon. These are the concepts of complexity and singularity, the former marking the complex entangled and multiple interactions between actants in musical improvisations, and the latter acknowledging the uniqueness of each improvisational performance as grounded in local space and time. Moreover, in Cobussen’s view, improvisation is “better approached through verbs than through nouns” (p. 39) and reflects the concrete practices in which improvising musicians deal with a multitude of environmental influences and channel these into a unique performance. In Part 2, split into 2 (“Digging”) and 2a (“Capsulizing”), Cobussen discusses a number of concepts and theorists to elucidate the above line of argument, among others actor-network theory by Bruno Latour, rhizome and assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari, the nonanthropocentrist ecology of Bateson, and the complexity account by Mitchell Waldrop. Thus, building on these primarily post-modernist thinkers, Cobussen lays the groundwork for his own view, the field of musical improvisation (FMI). Key tenets for FMI are: (1) It is not meant as a reductionist theory in which decontextualized mechanisms explain improvisation, rather as a descriptive and inspiring conceptual account that allows one to better qualitatively and holistically understand the complex dynamics of actual improvisations in lived contexts by showing how (musical and non-musical) elements interact in the situation. (2) It encompasses all music-making rather than improvisation only, as Cobussen considers the processes underlying improvisation to be no different than those for other forms of music-making. (3) It advocates singularity, which Cobussen refers to as each improvisation entailing a unique assemblage of actors, interactions and setting (p. 43). (4) It is not anthropocentric, thus regarding the agency of other situational elements than musicians essential as well. (5) It Music & Science Volume 1: 1–3 a The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav journals.sagepub.com/home/mns

Expanding Capabilities in Integrated Service Areas (ISAs) As Communities of Care : A Study of Dutch Older Adults’ Narratives on the Life They Have Reason to Value

Abstract We apply the capability approach to understand the scope and limitations of community efforts to support older adults dwelling in integrated service areas (ISAs) in the Netherlands. An ISA is a neighborhood-based form of care organization aimed at the widening of opportunities to achieve well-being goals by building on local community resources. To gain insight in the complex effects of ISAs on older adults’ well-being, a narrative study was performed on their daily lived experiences. Emerging narrative patterns were aggregated in a Manifesto of the Independently Living Older Person. Narrative patterns and Manifesto provided insight in both respondents’ capabilities and functionings, expressing values such as autonomy, human dignity and contributions to community care by older adults themselves. Older adults balance realistic and optimistic expectations for the future in ways that can be explained using the concepts of capability security, adaptive preferences, care-receiving and caring-with. Since interventions transpire through local interactions and shared practices, ISAs represent a social space in between individuality and collectivity where older adults enact community by sharing common ends. Findings imply that the complex interventions developed in ISAs expand older adults’ capabilities involving the challenge for all stakeholders to negotiate individual freedoms in community care settings.