Farrally, N (2025) Evaluation practices in community music: a constructionist approach to exploring community musicians’ perspectives. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University. doi: 10.17870/bathspa.00017281
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Abstract
Within UK community music, evaluation has become an essential element of professional practice, however, it is an aspect of their work that many community musicians find challenging. Although exploration of community music evaluation in published literature is limited, it has identified problems and tensions, but with minimal investigation of community music practitioners’ perspectives. This study explores community musicians’ constructions of evaluation practices, including how they negotiate evaluation and what influences evaluation in their work, to reach a deeper understanding of evaluation in community music for the benefit of the whole community music sector. With a qualitative, constructionist methodology, theoretically informed by discourse analysis and positioning theory, 16 one-to-one online semi-structured interviews with community musicians were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, leading to a series of findings. Although interviewees often constructed evaluation in the singular, it is a multifarious morass of intentions, purposes, methods, methodological standpoints and practices, with most valuing reflective forms of evaluation that focus on the quality of their practice above other forms. The metaphor of multiple dimensions characterises different aspects of evaluation – what it is, why community musicians do it, how they do it, and the affect of evaluation – which, along with a typology of different positions community musicians take towards evaluation and factors that influence the differing positions, provides a new conceptual framework for understanding evaluation in community music. The thesis argues that evaluation should be understood as multiple contextually situated practices which acknowledge the complexity of community music. The research calls for all those in the community music sector (project managers, evaluators, commissioners, funders and policy makers) to give greater consideration to community musicians’ perspectives, enabling more agency, control and influence over evaluation in their work; thereby contributing to greater professional satisfaction for community musicians who are a vital workforce as community music has become an important complement to music education and creative health and wellbeing. The research advocates for a grassroots community of practice regarding evaluation to enable utilisation of the findings in the UK community music sector and for a more cohesive view of evaluation to be developed.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | community music, community music sector, UK, evaluation, professional practice, semi-structured interviews, professional satisfaction, agency, music education, wellbeing |
| Divisions: | Bath School of Music and Performing Arts |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Sep 2025 14:23 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Sep 2025 14:24 |
| URN: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17281 |
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