Caring For, About, and With: Exploring Musical Meaningfulness Among Suzuki Students and Parents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An investigation of the relationships between empathy, music learning, and shared music values may provide new insights into the ways that musical meaningfulness and the symbiotic eudaimonic ideal – “flourishing of oneselfandof others” – might be cultivated. We investigated the relationships between parent perceptions of children’s empathy, parent beliefs and values about music, and formal Suzuki training over a period of 6 months, to understand ways in which shared music learning experiences might relate to emotional and musical connections between parents and children. Participants were parents of 48 Suzuki students at a structured Suzuki school in the Midwestern United States. We designed a survey containing an adapted version of the Griffith Empathy Measure for children with additional questions regarding family demographics and values regarding music education. Participants completed the survey at the start of the lesson year, and again 6 months later. Children who persisted in group lessons throughout the study began with significantly higher empathy scores, compared to those children who did not participate in group lessons. Children’s initial empathy scores were significantly positively correlated with parents’ ratings of the importance of music instruction generally, and of Suzuki instruction particularly, to their family. A significant but moderate correlation was found between initial empathy scores and the belief that music would help the child succeed in other areas. This exploratory study highlights potential relationships between family music values, children’s empathy, and participation in group music-making. Our findings are consistent with research demonstrating that child and parent personalities predict the duration of formal music training for children. They also support the philosophy of musical meaningfulness, by suggesting ways in which meaningful connections may be forged simultaneously between people who care for one another, and between people and the activities they care about. Our results point to the importance of providing a variety of music learning activities and structures that reflect the personality, needs, and interests of children and parents. We offer specific recommendations for future research to draw further insights and implications about these relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".