Music@Home: a novel instrument to assess the home musical environment in the early years

Article


Politimou, N., Stewart, L., Müllensiefen, D. and Franco, F. 2018. Music@Home: a novel instrument to assess the home musical environment in the early years. PLoS ONE. 13 (4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193819
TypeArticle
TitleMusic@Home: a novel instrument to assess the home musical environment in the early years
AuthorsPolitimou, N., Stewart, L., Müllensiefen, D. and Franco, F.
Abstract

The majority of children under the age of 5 appear to show spontaneous enjoyment of singing, being exposed to music and interacting with musical instruments, but whether variations in engaging in such activities in the home could contribute to developmental outcomes is still largely unknown. Critically, researchers lack a comprehensive instrument with good psychometric properties to assess the home musical environment from infancy to the preschool years. To address this gap, this paper presents two studies that describe the development and validation of the Music@Home questionnaire, which comprises two versions: Infant and Preschool. In Study 1, an initial pool of items was generated and administered to a wide audience of parents (n = 287 for the Infant, n = 347 for the Preschool version). Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify different dimensions comprising the home musical environment of both infants and pre-schoolers, and to reduce the initial pool of items to a smaller number of meaningful items. In Study 2, convergent and divergent validity and internal and test-retest reliability of the new instrument were established, using data from a different sample of participants (n = 213 for the Infant, n = 213 for the Preschool version). The second study also investigated associations between the Music@Home and musical characteristics of the parents, such as their musical education and personal engagement with music. Overall, the Music@Home constitutes a novel, valid and reliable instrument that allows for the systematic assessment of distinct aspects of the home musical environment in families with children under the age of 5. Furthermore, the Infant and Preschool versions of the Music@Home present differential associations with musical characteristics of the parents opening a new area of inquiry into how musical exposure and interaction in the home may vary across different developmental stages.

Research GroupLanguage, Learning and Cognition group
PublisherPublic Library of Science
JournalPLoS ONE
ISSN1932-6203
Publication dates
Online11 Apr 2018
Print11 Apr 2018
Publication process dates
Deposited13 Apr 2018
Submitted19 Sep 2017
Accepted20 Feb 2018
Output statusPublished
Publisher's version
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Copyright Statement

Copyright: © 2018 Politimou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Additional information

Data Availability Statement: All data files from the Music@Home development and validation study are available from the figshare database https://doi.org/10.22023/mdx.5398189.v1.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193819
LanguageEnglish
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https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/item/879vz

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