Page 55 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

an art therapy congress initiated by KenVaK, the Dutch Research Centre for the Arts Therapies (http://kenvak.hszuyd.nl/) in collaboration with the Dutch Association of Arts Therapists (http://www.vaktherapie.nl/). At the start of the congress, art therapists signed up to participate in the focus group.
Procedure
The group was divided into two consecutive sessions with 19 art therapists in each session. In each session material interaction was introduced as ‘the individual way a client uses the art materials which provides information about the client in the context of art therapy assessment’. All participants were asked to note key words they found characteristic for material interaction on coloured post-its. All participants received their own coloured post-its so that all input could be traced back to the individual. All post-its were put on large paper sheets on the wall. Next the participants were asked to cluster these post-its into categories based on their content. Each session ended with a general group discussion.
Results
All participants confirmed and recognised material interaction as an important source in art therapy assessment. The coding process showed that the preliminary categories encompassed almost all open codes of the focus group. To these ten categories, four new categories were added: ‘contact’, ‘dialogue’, ‘use of colour’ and ‘handling the art product’. Three of the initial categories were renamed based on the codes used by the participants: ‘dynamic’ became ‘intensity’, ‘repetition’ became ‘rhythm’ and ‘control’ became ‘structure’.
This led to fourteen categories of material interaction: movement, intensity, pressure, structure, tempo, grip, contact, rhythm, dialogue, space, line, use of colour, shaping and handling the product.
Based on these results we concluded that material interaction was found to be an important source in art therapy assessment. Despite differences in training background, work experience and work settings of the participants, similarities occured in describing material interaction and the categories which are perceived to be informative in art therapy assessment. Because we did not know whether these categories were interrelated, whether some categories were more important than others and which information could be gathered by observing them, a second study was necessary.
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