Using the Theory of Social Representations as a theoretical and methodological framework, the purpose of this study was to describe children’s representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement across middle childhood. Participants were primary students aged 8 to 11 (N = 132) from four schools in a large city in the Southeastern United States. Previous studies have documented that projective techniques (linguistic associations with textual stimuli) can access latent dimensions of thinking. Accordingly, linguistic associations with the textual stimuli “music,” “music and me,” music at school,” and “music outside school” were used to gain insight into children’s representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement. Participants were also asked to provide socio-demographic data that might influence their responses. The Correspondences Analysis technique was used to reconstruct representational fields associated with the stimuli. For each stimulus, a three-factor extraction identified hidden dimensions in children’s linguistic responses and summarized the links between contextual variables and children’s representations. Major findings suggest that children at increasingly younger ages express preferences and construct their own representations of music and musical identities.

使用社会表征理论作为理论和方法框架，本研究的目的是描述儿童在整个童年中期对音乐、音乐身份和音乐参与的表征。参与者为8至11岁的小学生（N= 132）来自美国东南部大城市的四所学校。先前的研究表明，投射技术（与文本刺激的语言关联）可以访问思维的潜在维度。因此，使用与文本刺激“音乐”、“音乐和我”、学校音乐和“校外音乐”的语言关联来深入了解儿童对音乐、音乐身份和音乐参与的表现。参与者还被要求提供可能影响他们反应的社会人口统计数据。对应分析技术被用于重建与刺激相关的代表性领域。对于每个刺激，三因素提取确定了儿童语言反应中的隐藏维度，并总结了上下文变量与儿童表征之间的联系。主要研究结果表明，越来越年轻的儿童表达偏好并构建自己的音乐和音乐身份表征。