Discussion
Although the results from this research indicate a relationship between a mental imagery program and certain indicators of economic practice, reservations must be made. First of all, this research is a single-case study. This might cause problems with the external validity of the research: the experiences of one person cannot be extrapolated to a broader group. However, since one of the goals of the research was to enrich my own experiences as a musician, this doesn’t matter too much. It can be interesting to do further research on this subject, since the results indicate some strong benefits of mental imagery. To make sure that future research is not lacking the validity that this research is, one must make sure that the intervention is better organized. It would be recommendable to organize the intervention in the form of an experiment with an experimental group that receives the mental imagery program and a control group that receives no such treatment – in which case the groups need to be very large in order to have clear statistical results.
Furthermore, the single case in this research was the researcher herself which can cause problems with internal validity. Since the researcher knows a lot about mental imagery and the potential benefits, the researcher is likely to have certain expectations (both conscious and unconscious) which might influence the outcome. Besides that, there might be an effect on the performance of the researcher just because of the fact that something new is introduced. This has been partially prevented by letting the researcher track her practice habits way before the intervention started. This made it possible to see if the ‘normal’ practice sessions during the intervention were any different from the normal practice sessions before the intervention. This seemed to be the case: during the normal sessions, the levels of confidence of the participant followed a similar pattern both before and during the intervention. At first, they were high, but they dropped when the imagery exercises got more familiar. During the period before the intervention, the confidence levels of the participant fluctuated by day. Future research involving executing a large-scale experiment could shed more light on this problem.
