Rachael Shaffer ’23

Major: Music and Health Sciences: Communication Sciences and Disorders
Project: Speech-Language Pathology and Music Therapy: An Exploration of Collaboration
Advisor: Eric J. Sanders, assistant professor and program director of the master’s program in speech-language pathology

Rachael Shaffer’s dual areas of study, music and health sciences, led to a focus on speech pathology and inspired her interdisciplinary research. She and her advisor, Eric Sanders, assistant professor and program director of the master’s program in speech-language pathology, developed the project while brainstorming about the collaborative relationship between speech-language pathologists and music therapists.

“We looked at the literature and found that there was minimal current research on this collaborative relationship, especially from the speech-language pathologists’ perspective,” Shaffer says.

Shaffer conducted multiple semi-structured interviews, focusing on how speech-language pathologists and music therapists collaborate and cotreat in different clinical settings and with different populations. Her main difficulty in the research process, she says, was initial low responsiveness from her subjects.

“The biggest obstacle was recruitment,” Shaffer says. “It took about three weeks of sending emails and making posts to various related Facebook groups before we received any responses.”

Shaffer is in the process of comparing interview transcripts as part of her analysis. Her hands-on experience with this project opened her eyes to the complexity of research.

“There is a lot more behind the scenes of a research article than one may see,” Shaffer says. “Also it may not work out as you planned, but there are steps one can take to get past those hurdles.”

This project was introduced at the Landmark Conference Summer Research Symposium at Moravian.