Describing what the body plays: the BODYPERC checklist for reporting body percussion interventions, a method-neutral extension of TIDieR and CERT
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Body percussion, the production of rhythm by clapping, snapping, patting and stamping on one’s own body, is increasingly used as an intervention in schools, rehabilitation settings and community programmes for older adults, often within dance- and music-based approaches. Evidence synthesis is limited less by a shortage of studies than by how interventions are described. Two programmes labelled “body percussion” can differ in the body surfaces struck, the tempo, the organisation of the limbs, the concurrent cognitive task, the social formation and the dose, and research on bimanual coordination, sensorimotor synchronisation, dual-tasking and interpersonal synchrony suggests that each of these features can change what participants do and, plausibly, what they gain. Reports usually specify only some. TIDieR describes any intervention but does not prompt its rhythmic or motor content; CERT specifies exercise dose but not musical structure or cognitive load; and reporting guidance for music-based interventions addresses the music but not the body as instrument. This conceptual analysis proposes BODYPERC, a method-neutral checklist of 33 items in 11 domains for reporting body percussion interventions and their comparators. Items were derived by mapping existing guidelines and the implementation-fidelity literature onto five features that distinguish body percussion as an intervention class: the coincidence of effector and instrument, rhythmic structure as a dose parameter, deliberately manipulated cognitive load, interpersonal synchrony as a social ingredient, and repertoire drawn from living cultural traditions. The checklist requires interventions to be described by their features rather than by a method’s name, specifies the equivalences a comparison condition must meet before it can be called an active control, and adds process measures (timing precision, interpersonal synchrony and dual-task cost) that allow delivery to be verified from audio recordings or wearable sensors. Applied to three purposively selected reports, it identified features that none reported, including tempo, auditory context, fidelity monitoring and adverse events; whether these gaps are typical of the literature requires a structured audit, whose protocol is provided. The main limitation is that BODYPERC derives from conceptual analysis, not expert consensus; an audit, a Delphi study and a reliability study are required before it can become a standard.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology
Institution: University of Alicante
Language: English
Topic: Music Therapy and Health
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7223184677