Effects of Popular Music on Youth with ACEs

Jay Terry is a graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School with over a decade of experience working with children of all ages including those with behavioral issues and emotional disturbances. She also serves as the Youth Activities Director for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and specializes in pop culture as a means for coping and healing for adolescents.  

Purpose:

For this project, I wanted to gain an understanding of what effect popular culture had on youth with Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs for short. If they were exposed to a scheduled regiment of listening to the music that speaks most to them, and then discussing that music openly in a facilitated focus group setting, what, if any effect would this practice have on their mood and outlook on life?

Methodology:

To answer this question, my team and I assembled a group of 15 children aged 11-17 from the Metro Nashville Public School System. In our first meeting I asked the children what songs and artists they turned to when they were feeling despondent. (Angry, sad, depressed or overwhelmed) I compiled a list of source material based on their responses. My team also came up with a list of what we call “tenets of spirituality”. These are attributes and qualities that help encourage spiritual formation as well as strong interpersonal relationships with members of one’s community. Those 17 tenets are: leadership, compassion, advocacy, equity, integrity, responsibility, diversity, inclusion, active-listening, confidence, cooperation, generosity, honesty, open-mindedness, optimism, patience, self-control and thoughtfulness. One of the things that was paramount to us was that we didn’t want to just feed information and platitudes to the children. We emphasized not preaching to them, but rather giving them a platform to speak and to work things out for themselves. To that end, we guided the participants into creating their own definitions for these words and what the concepts meant to them. 

At each of our bi-weekly meetings we selected one of the songs from the list they created and listened to it together. Participants were then encouraged to engage the material using the following prompts: “Did you like the song?” “Did you feel like you could relate to the song?” “Which tenets of spirituality were present in the song?” and “Which tenets were absent or needed?” Next, we put the song in context with the Bible by reading a story together in which the character in the text has a similar experience to the one described in the song. Participants were then encouraged to engage the scripture using the same prompts as those listed above. Finally, we asked the participants how the story and song were similar and how they were different. 

Results:

After 9 weeks, 71% of the participants reported an increase in their confidence that they would be able to succeed in the future. This would seem to suggest that middle and high school students benefit from being able to engage with popular music and biblical narratives in group settings.

Limitations:

I’d like to delve deeper into this study by making it both smaller and larger. Results will be more definitive if they can be replicated on a larger scale, so I would be interested in performing an identical study with a group of 100 or more participants. Conversely,  participants in this study curated one list of songs which we drew from for the entire group. As a result some songs spoke specifically to some students while holding little or no significance for others. For that reason, it would be interesting to see if the practice is more effective with a smaller group of children so that they have more control of what songs they listen to and can listen to their favorite songs more often. 

Deductions:

I noticed 2 specific things about this particular group of participants. First, they are extremely intelligent. They didn’t  require extensive guidance in understanding the prompts or the biblical text. They were able to articulate their ideas and further the discussion with minimal interference from the adult facilitators. Second, they displayed an intellectual courage in their convictions. They were brave enough to speak their minds, even if it meant differing from the majority consensus and even when it meant reading against the traditional biblical interpretation. If they didn’t like something they weren’t afraid to say it and if the actions of the people in the biblical stories didn’t make sense to them, they weren’t afraid to question their motives. I was taken aback and pleasantly surprised by the courage of their convictions. 

Interaction with popular culture and biblical narratives shows promising findings for youth with ACEs. When they are able to relate their own struggles with those of their favorite artists, it gives them hope that they too can survive their circumstances and achieve the type of success enjoyed by those they admire. Contextualizing biblical narratives with pop culture makes the stories more real to youth and provides a moral framework which they can use to order their lives.