Children’s Representations of Music, Musical Identities, and Musical Engagement: Content and Socio-Demographic Influences

Using the Theory of Social Representations as a theoretical and methodological framework, the purpose of this study was to describe children’s representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement across middle childhood. Participants were primary students aged 8 to 11 (N = 132) from four schools in a large city in the Southeastern United States. Previous studies have documented that projective techniques (linguistic associations with textual stimuli) can access latent dimensions of thinking. Accordingly, linguistic associations with the textual stimuli “music,” “music and me,” music at school,” and “music outside school” were used to gain insight into children’s representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement. Participants were also asked to provide socio-demographic data that might influence their responses. The Correspondences Analysis technique was used to reconstruct representational fields associated with the stimuli. For each stimulus, a three-factor extraction identified hidden dimensions in children’s linguistic responses and summarized the links between contextual variables and children’s representations. Major findings suggest that children at increasingly younger ages express preferences and construct their own representations of music and musical identities.