The Research Committee invites art therapy researchers to present at the annual Research Roundtable at the American Art Therapy Association conference each year. The Roundtable is a forum for sharing ideas about on-going or proposed research projects. Those who are conducting pilot studies, those who are seeking design or methodological feedback from colleagues, or individuals eager to learn about current art therapy research may be interested in attending.
Anyone wishing to present at the Research Roundtable should contact Dr. Frances Kaplan, ATR-BC, Roundtable Coordinator, at evefish37@comcast.net to reserve a place on the agenda. Presenters will have an opportunity to briefly describe their work, and attendees have a chance to ask questions and provide feedback.
Art Therapy Practice Research Network (ATPRN)
The ATPRN is a UK-wide group of art therapists who collaborate on practice-led research and evaluation ventures. It is not just a paper network: it involves meeting and working with other art therapists who are grappling with similar issues and is aimed at actively producing publishable research evidence for the field of art therapy. It is free to join, but a cost-based fee is charged for the twice-yearly symposia.
The ATPRN is open to art therapists regardless of their research or clinical experience. The ATPRN has the research resources of Goldsmiths College as its Central Academic Institution (CAI) but the direction of the research is led by the practitioner membership. The ATPRN will be involved in both quantitative and qualitative means of research.
Research Resources and Statistical Help Desk
There are a number of online resources available to art therapists who are in need of statistics information and services: One of the most popular software packages for statistical analysis: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Basic data analysis procedures can be found at: http://www.statcrunch.com/ Instructions for using Microsoft Excel: http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html
American Educational Research Association (AERA): If you go to their internet resources section, there are instructions for getting on their electronic mailing lists. The Division D mailing list is recommended - members post questions/requests for help regarding research design and statistical analyses.
Information about qualitative methods can be found at: International Institute for Qualitative Methodology
Art Therapy Resources & Links
This section contains a list of art therapy (and related websites) and on-line forums to assist art therapists in locating available resources on the web. Tools and information on conducting, publishing, or presenting art therapy research are also included.
General
www.ExploreHEALTHCareers.org - Art Therapist career profile featured on an online health careers resource for students and advisors.
Careers in Allied Health - American Medical Association (AMA) website with information on art therapy from the AMA's Health Professions Career and Education Directory..
Art Therapy Meet Up Worldwide - Meet other Art Therapists and/or those who are studying art therapy. Gather to network and share experiences and advice.
Arts Facts . . . SAT Scores and the Arts Monograph- Monograph from Americans for the Arts that shows students with four years of high school arts classes have higher SAT scores than students with one-half year or less.
Art Therapy Credentials Board - The Art Therapy Credentials Board, Inc. (ATCB), an independent organization, grants postgraduate registration (ATR) after reviewing documentation of completion of graduate education and postgraduate supervised experience. The Registered Art Therapist who successfully completes the written examination administered by the ATCB is qualified as Board Certified (ATR-BC), a credential requiring maintenance through continuing education credits.
The National Coalition of Creative Arts Therapies Associations - The National Coalition of Creative Arts Therapies Associations is an alliance of professional associations dedicated to the advancement of the arts as therapeutic modalities. NCCATA represents over 8000 individual members of six creative arts therapies associations.
Art Therapy Dialogue Group on Yahoo - Art-tx@yahoogroups.com is a dialogue group for art therapists and art therapy educators. It serves as a dialogue forum for professional art therapy issues and concerns. To subscribe, send a blank message to art-tx-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and also a message to Larkcarol@earthlink.net , including your name, address, and AATA status.
ART THERAPY LIBRARY RESOURCES GUIDE From the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), Inc. Compiled by Gretchen Miller, ATR-BC and Cathy A.Malchiodi, ATR-BC, HLM
The American Art Therapy Association (AATA) is pleased to provide this guide to library resources on the field of art therapy. This updated guide includes information previously provided by The George Washington University Library and current information on online library searches from the staff at the Lesley University [http://www.lesley.edu] Ludcke Library.
LITERATURE SEARCHES
Today, almost all library catalogs are online rather than in card catalog form. As a result, keyword searching rather than standard subject-heading searching has become typical. Keyword searching allows combinations of concepts such as “art therapy” and “children” or “art” and “mental illness.” Although the Library of Congress [http://www.loc.gov] subject headings can be useful for standardized terminology for books, most periodical indexes use their own thesauri. Keyword searching allows more flexibility and, depending upon how you use it, more precision or greater scope.
Search Tips
Truncation
Many databases allow a user to truncate words in a search to retriever variant endings. Commonly used truncation symbols are * and $. An example would be therap* = therapy, therapies, therapeutic. However, do not use this search method for art because art* finds unrelated words like, article, artificial, artifice, etc.
Use any of the following methods to search:
• art therapy • therap* and art • patient and art • trauma and art • creative arts therap* • art therap* and (topic)
Call Numbers
Call numbers for material in art therapy vary according to the major emphasis of the book. Library of Congress call numbers follow a standardized system. Here are examples of call number areas that may include art therapy material:
• BF (psychology) • GV (recreation) • HV (social sciences) • LB (education • N (art) • RC, RJ, RM (medical sciences) • WM (National Library of Medicine call number for Art Therapy)
Many libraries subscribe to a service called OCLC’s WorldCat that includes over 36 million items, mostly books, from thousands of libraries in the United States and selected other countries. (For a description of OCLC, see below.) The WorldCat database includes all dates of publication for books, both current and historical.
LIBRARY DATABASES
Academic Search Premier/EBSCOHost offers many full text articles from issues of the American Journal of Art Therapy that are currently out of print. Any search for "art therapy" will include results from this journal.
PsycINFO is a scholarly psychology database that includes some references to expressive therapies topics. This is not a full-text database, but provides links to some articles from other databases. It is the online version of Psychological Abstracts. Some of the subjects it covers are art therapy, child psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, and research in psychology (including articles published in the journal Visual Arts Research). The database includes citations to journal articles, chapters of books on psychology, and dissertations. http://www.apa.org/psycinfo .
Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (Medline) is a scholarly medical database with references to articles on the art therapies in medical journals. Medline is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains approximately 16 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html for information or access the NLM’s free version of Medline at http://pubmed.gov
Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL) covers over 900 nursing, allied health, biomedical, and consumer health journals, publications of the American Nursing Association, and the National League for Nursing. You can find it at http://www.cinahl.com. Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is found at http://www.eric.ed.gov and is the most complete source of articles and books on art therapy. While not all published art therapy articles are available through this site, many articles are available as PDFs for download. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read these files. To download a free copy of Acrobat Reader, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html .
Sample Page from ERIC:
Art Therapy with a Hemodialysis Patient: A Case Analysis. Brief Report ERIC #: EJ722385 Publication Date: 2005-00-00. Author: Nishida, Miki; Strobino, Jane Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research Journal/Source Name: Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association Journal Citation: v22 n4 p221-226 2005 Descriptors: Art Therapy; Patients; Well Being; Self Esteem; Participant Satisfaction; Interpersonal
Communication
Abstract: Art therapy has been used to support the coping skills of patients with various medical illnesses.
The purpose of this case study was to examine the usefulness of art therapy in promoting communication and a positive sense of well-being in a hemodialysis patient. The participant was a 57- year-old Caucasian female who had been treated with hemodialysis for the past 3 years.
OCLC FirstSearch [ http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch ] is the most widely used nationally known library services company that provides many databases for research. Other competitors with their own database packages and software include such companies as Ovid, UMI, InfoTrac, and SilverPlatter. Often several different vendors offer the same electronic indexes, and a librarian can help in identifying the location (and sometimes different name) of a particular database. Public libraries currently have retained many indexes in print, but most academic libraries have canceled print indexes in favor in Internet subscriptions.
Art Abstracts is the online version of Art Index in abstract form. It covers the world of art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, video, and film. Indexes leading art publications, including art reproductions.
Article1st contains citations for articles in the humanities, popular culture, social science, technology, business, and medicine. Each record lists library holdings with some abstracts included. Periodical Abstracts is a multi-subject periodical index to the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as topics of general interest. It includes all journals from Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature as well as several other indexes. Full-text articles are available.
INDEXES AND ABSTRACTS
Abstracts in Social Gerontology- Available though http://www.sagepub.com Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography- Contains abstracts of articles which have appeared in psychological, educational, medical and other journals which deal with the study of children. It includes notices of new books, pamphlets, and periodicals in the field. Go to http://www.srcd.org/cdab.html. Exceptional Child Education Resources- http://www.cec.sped.org. Sage Family Studies Abstracts- Covers books, articles, and government publications in the fields of psychology, sociology, education and law as they apply to families. See http://www.sagepub.com. Dissertation Abstracts at http://il.proquest.com/brand/umi.shtml is the definitive guide to more than 1.6 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses. It offers access to more than 90 percent of the doctoral dissertations accepted each year in North America. It is the most comprehensive information resource covering doctoral dissertations and master's theses.
HELPFUL HANDBOOKS FOR PUBLICATION AND LITERATURE SEARCHES
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: Fifth Edition, American Psychological Association (APA); for additional help with APA style guidelines, visit APA's online resource www.apastyle.org.
PROFESSIONAL JOURNALS
Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association The Arts in Psychotherapy The Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal International Journal of Art Therapy: Inscape [previously called Inscape: The Journal of the British Association of Art Therapists] Journal of Creativity in Mental Health Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts Arts & Health (available March 2009)
THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Thousands of sites for art therapy, psychology, health sciences, and art exist on the World Wide Web (www). They vary tremendously in quality. The WWW is a dynamic source for information that changes daily. While there is a wide range of information, remember that there is no screening on the Internet to separate authoritative from amateur information.
Many search engines exist to provide some order to Internet searching. Google, http://www.google.com and Yahoo!, http://www.yahoo.com , are two widely used search engines for obtaining information on the Internet. Google provides a “cheat sheet” on how to use its search engine and get the most out of your search at http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/cheatsheet.html . Other search engines include:
Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/ provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. You can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
iBoogie at http://iboogie.com/ clusters groupings of similar objects from a given set of inputs. In the context of search engines, it will put documents with similar content or with related topics into the same cluster (group).
OTHER RESOURCES
Visit the American Art Therapy Association at http://www.americanarttherapyassociation.org . This official web site of the American Art Therapy Association contains information about the association, various upcoming conference and symposia, lists of publications, and links to other useful sites. Consider becoming a member of AATA and take advantage of access to resources, publications, and discounts on conferences and other services.