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What is the impact of the arts on people affected by homelessess? - Bruna Martins

Hello! Today I would like to share a bit more about a project that I am conducting. 

Just to remind you, the big name for my PhD project is "Exploring the balance of socio-musical factors that shape the experiences of members of choirs for people affected by homelessness" (yes, I finally memorized it!).

To start understanding this topic I decided to conduct a scoping review.  My objective, first, was to map the literature about any collective music activities and their impacts on people affected by homelessness. I wanted to understand not only which impacts were found, but which methods were used to find them, which approaches were adopted, and where these studies took place. 

I conducted a search through a few databases but only found 9 papers, which was not ideal for a scoping review. After talking to my supervisors we agreed that I could expand my search to any arts-related collective activity. This strategy, hopefully, would give me more results and would be an opportunity to learn from other areas. 

In fact, now I have 40 papers on my scoping review.  I am still in the process of analyzing their data, but I already have a few interesting things that I would like to share:

  • Most papers were conducted on countries in the Global North: Canada, the USA, and the UK. Even when I searched for papers in Portuguese and Spanish, which are languages that I know and that are spoken in the Global South, the papers in these languages were still scarce.  
  • Most papers used qualitative methods. Interviews were the preferred method of most studies, followed by observations and focus groups. 
  • Participatory approaches were adopted in a few papers. Studies used creative methods such as photovoice, vox pops, and artistic outputs. 
  • The impacts analyzed are mostly related to social gainings, such as improved social skills, building community, and fighting stigma 
Further analysis is underway and hopefully, it will be completed by next month. I will present the results at the next ESCOM conference which will happen from the 3rd to the 6th of July, 2024. If you are interested in knowing more about this project do find me there! 

See you soon!

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