"A Quantitative Validation of a Qualitative Phenomenological Art-Therapy Cross-Cultural

Silvia Wyder ^*

• Rrosa Institute, Palermo, Italy

In an arts and health cross-cultural study, which incorporated three clinical fieldwork periods in Paris (France), Wil (CH) and Ohmiya (Japan), I demonstrated the validity of a phenomenological qualitative research method via quantitative means. The art therapeutic fieldwork consisted of the same topical suggestion, the 'house', for all the cohorts, which included 30 patients, both adults (24 - 68 years), and adolescents (15 - 18 years). The art media used was painting and drawing; the fieldwork length spanned from five weeks to five months.The consistency between the findings obtained via a qualitative phenomenological approach (retroactively written down observational field-notes (patient observations), patients' narratives, and aesthetic works), and the data (results from a semi-structured interview (Wyder, 2016), Posttraumatic Stress Disorder IES-R test, Weiss & Marmar, 1996/97)) based on the evaluation and analysis via quantitative procedures demonstrates and substantiates the validity of phenomenological observational field-note taking and of the following coding-procedure (Van Manen, 2011). The study allowed discovering emerging specific themes and patterns, leading to clusters, in both phenomenology-based procedures.The applied analytical strategy can thus be considered as a methodological step forward in an arts and health phenomenological inquiry, as it allowed to cross-validate a phenomenological observational qualitative and a semi-structured interview-based qualitative approach, via quantitative methods, leading to the identification of identical conceptual clusters and furthermore in the same proportions. Importantly, the findings are independent of the involved cultures, ethnicity, age, gender, or the psychiatric clinics' format (closed, and out-patients). Hence, this study's findings demonstrate that if a rigorous qualitative phenomenological method is applied within arts and health research, the resulting quantitative findings can be considered as valid.