What evidence? Designing a mixed methods study to investigate music therapy with children who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in New Zealand contexts

• Limited potential exists for positivist research with children who have ASD in NZ.
• The EBP concept has inherent challenges which are reflected in the practice of music therapy with children who have ASD in NZ.
• Music therapists can utilise designs that provide outcome data as well as understanding of the treatment process.
• Increasing alignment between education and music therapy assessment processes provide new research potentials.
• Mixed methods research is particularly useful for researchers in applied fields such as music therapy.

Music therapists are frequently called upon to produce ‘evidence’ that the services they offer are ‘effective’. However, a vicious cycle can exist in which efforts to develop a knowledge base that will satisfy demands for Evidence Based Practice (EBP) are hampered by limited music therapy practice, which is partially due to the lack of current evidence. In this article we discuss the dilemmas that music therapists face in designing research to meet the demands of EBP with children who have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), when populations and practices are heterogeneous, and professional values are incongruent with quantitative paradigms. Our discussion is grounded in the context of exploratory research which aimed to gather information regarding the practice of music therapy with children who have ASD in New Zealand, in order to scope and design research appropriate for the New Zealand context. We use this discussion to demonstrate the value of mixed methods designs for music therapy, and introduce a specific proposal based on the findings of our exploratory research to investigate the perceived impact of music therapy to support the interpersonal communication of individuals who have ASD using a convergent parallel mixed methods design.