A comparison of the effects of rock and roll and easy listening music on the incidence of aberrant behaviors in an intermediate care facility for the mentally retarded

This project explores the effects of no background music, rock & roll background music, and easy listening background music on the aberrant behavior of clients in an Intermediate Care Facility for the Mentally Retarded (ICF/MR). The participating individuals in this study live in two homes and total 20 clients. The study took 5 weeks to complete. Week 1 consisted of no background music, week 2 consisted of rock & roll background music, week 3 no background music, week 4 easy listening background music, and week 5 no background music.; The "no background music" condition was planned and implemented during three of the 5 weeks in the research period. Clients' scores on the ABC-C instrument showed an unusually low level of aberrant behavior during one of the weeks in which no background music was played (week 5). This change might have been associated with the clients' eagerness to be included on a special trip planned for the following week. Individual attendance on the trip was dependent on the behavior of the client. To avoid using widely fluctuating data to represent base-line behavior (i.e., behavior with no background music), the researcher used data for week 1 as the only measure of behavior during the "no background music" condition.; The instrument used to collect data was the Aberrant Behavior Checklist-Community (ABC-C). The ABC-C consists of five sub-scales: Irritability, Lethargy, Stereotypy, Hyperactivity, and Inappropriate Speech. Stereotypy sub-scale and the Inappropriate sub-scale were not analyzed due to low levels of inter-rater reliability which would place in question the validity of the results of the hypothesis tests of these two sub-scales, as well as the overall scores.; A one way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to identify significant differences in clients' behavior under three conditions (no background music, rock & roll background music, and easy listening background music). Mean differences in the ABC-C scores of the three sub-scale scores (irritability, Lethargy, and Hyperactivity) were examined in the analysis. No statistically significant difference was found in any of the hypotheses and the null hypotheses were not rejected.