Music-Based Intervention Reporting for Children with Autism: Implications for Music Therapy Publication Guidelines

Various published guidelines exist to help investigators working with individuals with autism produce quality research reports. These guidelines support an evidence-based practice paradigm and generally posit that interventions should be described with sufficient detail to allow replication. However, they do not address the complex components of music-based interventions to allow transparent reporting and accurate reproduction. Recently, Robb, Burns, and Carpenter (2010) developed the Music-Based Intervention Reporting Criteria, a thorough checklist for reporting music-based interventions. In the current study, this checklist was applied to 23 publications of music-based interventions for children with autism from 1990 to February 2010 in order to evaluate the completeness of the intervention descriptions and identify areas for improvement. Significant gaps in intervention reporting were discovered in six areas: intervention theory, music reference, intervention materials, interventionist, treatment fidelity, and setting. Implications for improving the quality of future publications of music-based interventions for children with autism are discussed.