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Researchers have found that many post-secondary music students suffer from physical and mental health issues. However, researchers have mainly studied these problems at the individual level, with little investigation of how music students’ work is shaped by the coordinating effects of policies, texts, and discourses at and beyond their local site. This paper describes a protocol for an international project that will explore the health of music students in the context of their daily work. Using an institutional ethnography approach, we will examine the social organization of music students’ work at three universities: two in Canada and one in Australia. This will be the first set of studies that use institutional ethnography specifically for the purpose of understanding how the social organization of music students’ work shapes their health. Data will be collected using several methods common to institutional ethnography: interviews, focus groups, observations, and collecting texts. Data analysis will begin during the data collection process and proceed in two fluid stages. The first stage will involve a detailed investigation of the pertinent work activities at each music school. The second will involve linking that work to specific social relations within and beyond the institution. After data analysis has been completed at all three sites, findings will be compared to one another to identify commonalities and differences in how students’ work is organized. Findings of the entire project may inform policy-making and lead to positive change at the institutions studied, as well as others where similar social organization may occur. The novel approach described here will provide opportunities to expand current knowledge about music students’ work and health beyond what has been learned through approaches that focus on students’ individual behaviours and attributes.

Pianists experience high rates of Playing-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (PRMDs). Biomechanical factors have been investigated by both researchers and music teachers as potentially significant in PRMD development. Knowledge exchange between the fields of music and science about PRMDs may be beneficial, but differences in language use can make interdisciplinary communication challenging. One potential solution is to translate pedagogical ideas into language that is consistent with biomechanical science. Doing so could improve interdisciplinary communication and allow for scientific examination of pedagogical ideas. However, no methods for doing so have been published. To fill this gap, we developed a methodological framework with two stages for translating ideas about piano technique into scientific language: Stage 1 uses Qualitative Content Analysis to summarize pedagogical content; then, Stage 2 includes an “Analysis of Biomechanical Language,” in which researchers translate the ideas described in Stage 1. Both stages are collaborative and rely on expert consultation to produce an appropriate translation. This article outlines the framework and explains how it was used in an initial study on the Taubman Approach. Further methodological guidance to assist researchers in future studies is given based on some of the challenges encountered in the initial study. The framework and guidance here will allow researchers to carry out more studies of this kind. Because the framework is newly developed, it will likely need to be adapted further as more studies are done.