Effect of Therapeutic Listening®: A Retrospective Data Analysis

Edgehill Mansion, Garden Room, Dominican University of California

Parents, teachers, and occupational therapists report significant improvements in motor, sensory and social emotional skills in their clients when using the Therapeutic Listening® protocol. Currently, few formal research studies support the clinical effectiveness of this widely used therapy. In an effort to generate further data, a multiple case study retrospective analysis was performed on clinical data from expert-level clinicians. The study aimed to map common skills targeted by therapists using TL®, document trends in change, examine current trends in evaluation, intervention, and documentation and evaluate best practices for measuring and documenting progress. The results of this analysis suggest that the clients who received intervention with a TL® protocol demonstrated improvements in motor, sensory, and social emotional capacities when utilized within a comprehensive occupational therapy sensory integration program. Clinicians utilizing the TL® protocol would benefit from a standardized documentation protocol to promote clear identification of progress toward goals and to facilitate aggregation of data for research, thus enabling researchers to build more concrete, data driven clinical evidence for its use.