Abstract
Evidence on the role of the arts in promoting health and wellbeing has grown over the last two decades. In the United Kingdom, studies using secondary data sources have documented temporal variations in levels of arts engagement in the population, its determinants and its mental wellbeing implications. However, arts engagement is often characterized by prioritizing “high-brow” art forms. In this article, we introduce the HEartS Survey, a tool that aims to increase the balance between inclusivity and brevity of existing arts engagement measures and to focus specifically on the connection between arts engagement and social wellbeing. We explore trends in participatory and receptive engagement with literary, visual, performing, crafts and decorative arts among 5,338 adults in the UK in 2018–2019 using summative engagement scores and cluster analysis. Regression models, adjusted for demographic, socioeconomic, health, and social covariates, examine correlations between arts engagement and psychological and social wellbeing measures. Over 97% of respondents reported engagement in one or more arts activities at least once during 2018–2019, with reading and listening to music being the most popular activities. Arts engagement grouped into three distinct clusters: 19.8% constituted “low engagers” whose main source of engagement was occasional reading; 44.4% constituted “receptive consumers” who read and listened to music frequently and engaged with popular receptive arts activities such as cinema, live music, theater, exhibitions, and museums; and 35.8% constituted “omnivores” who frequently engaged in almost all arts activities. In agreement with existing studies, more arts engagement was associated with higher levels of wellbeing, social connectedness, and lower odds of intense social loneliness. In contrast, we found a positive association between more arts engagement, depression, and intense emotional loneliness for the most highly engaged omnivores. We conclude that arts engagement in the population forms specific profiles with distinct characteristics and consider implications for mental and social wellbeing.
Highlights
Worldwide, engagement with the arts is routinely monitored by governments and cultural institutions in order to understand participation trends and impacts on health and wellbeing
Done any crafts or decorative arts Been to a literary event Listened to audio books or podcasts Been to live music Listened to recorded music Been to live dance Been to live theatre or circus Watched a film or drama at a cinema Been to exhibition, museum etc
Based on data collected from 5,338 adults in the United Kingdom (UK), we found that over 97% of respondents reported engagement in at least one arts activity at least once during 2018–2019, with reading and listening to music the most popular activities
Summary
Engagement with the arts is routinely monitored by governments and cultural institutions in order to understand participation trends and impacts on health and wellbeing. In England, a limited number of questions on arts engagement have been asked in other ongoing cohort studies of specific populations such as The Whitehall II Study, a cohort of 10,308 British Civil Service employees recruited in 1985, and The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a cohort of non-institutionalized English people aged 50 years and older at enrolment in 2002–2003. These large scale studies incorporated measures of some aspects of wellbeing, with a focus on depression and mental health [e.g. 2–5] and some more limited aspects of loneliness and social connectedness. This article re-examines the possible representations of arts engagement, compares two different analytical approaches on the same data, and investigates the relationship between arts engagement and measures of mental and, in particular, social wellbeing
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