Attribution theory as an influence on the musical lives of children.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this research was to investigate self-attribution of success and non-success as an influence on the musical lives of children in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.
The questions of this study were as follows: (1) What causes do middle school students attribute to their success or non-success in music? (2) What attributional dimensions are most prevalent among middle school students' attributions? (3) How does music participation vary with attributional style?.
One hundred students from four schools participated in the study. Each student answered two questionnaires, providing the researcher with three levels of information. First, students described the extent of their music participation during the preceding year, using the Music Participation Scale (MPS). Next students responded to questionnaire items that revealed causal explanations and causal dimensions for their success or non-success in music, using the Music Attributional Styles Questionnaire (MASQ). Finally, within MASQ, subjects responded to a description of six music-specific situations to reveal the nature of their attributional style.
Two raters categorized the subjects' self-attributions for music success or non-success. The researcher identified ten categories for music success and six categories for music non-success according to the prevalence of open-ended responses cited by the subjects. The coded explanations for music success were (1) affect for music, (2) musical ability/musical knowledge, (3) effort, (4) practice, (5) music participation, (6) musical talent, (7) environment/background, (8) private lessons, (9) personal commitment, and (10) ease of task. The coded explanations for music non-success were lack of (1) affect for music, (2) musical ability/musical knowledge, (3) practice, (4) music participation, (5) effort, and (6) environment/background.
Separate binomial tests were calculated to discover which attributional dimensions were most prevalent among middle school students' attributions. Subjects who perceived themselves as successful in music tended to cite causes that were internal, stable, controllable (internally and externally) and intentional. Subjects who perceived themselves as unsuccessful in music tended to cite causes that were internal, unstable, domain-specific, internally controllable, externally uncontrollable, and unintentional.
The researcher subjected data obtained from the individual dimension ratings to separate Chi-square tests, with attributional dimension tendencies as dependent variables and the two levels of music participation as the independent variables. Results of the Chi-square analysis indicated no significant difference in music participation due to attributional style.