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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to analyze the contents of doctoral dissertation abstracts related to beginning band education. A search of the UMI ProQuest Digital Dissertations revealed 87 dissertations written between the years 1958-2004. Dissertation abstracts and titles were analyzed in the following categories: sample type, year of completion, and ten topic areas. Results indicated that students in the fifth grade most frequently served as the sample group for these studies; the greatest number of dissertations pertaining to beginner band were written in the 1990s; and the topic areas most frequently addressed were instructional strategies and instructional materials. The need for future doctoral research in the area of beginning band teacher education was discussed.
Beginning band instruction has been the subject of several doctoral dissertations over the past forty-six years. One approach to systematically examining this body of literature is to conduct a content analysis. Holsti (1969) proposed a broad definition of content analysis as, "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages" (p. 14). Content analyses provide researchers with indicators of trends, concerns, interests, and patterns, and suggest areas of investigation that may be useful to pursue. Content analysis can also be a useful technique for allowing us to describe and discover the focus of individual, group, institutional, or social attention (Weber, 1990).
Previous researchers have used content analysis as a mode of inquiry to examine a variety of topics related to music education. Price and Orman (1999, 2001) investigated the number and type of sessions offered at MENC's national biennial in-service conferences. Yarbrough (1984), Radocy (1998), and Erbie (2002) investigated characteristics of research included in prominent music education journals. Additional analyses have been conducted to determine characteristics of music education authors (Geringer, 2000) and journal citations (Brittin & Standley, 1997; Hamann & Lucas, 1998; LeBlanc & McCrary, 1991; Sample, 1992; Schmidt and Zdzinski, 1993; Standley, 1984). Kantorski (1995) analyzed the contents of doctoral research between the years 1936 and 1992 that directly related to string education.
The content analysis of doctoral research related to string education by Kantorski served as the model for this study. Kantorski categorized the content of 252 dissertations into nine topic-areas: (1) curriculum designs and instructional strategies; (2) methods;...