Arts for a Change: Collegiate Arts Attendance as a Mechanism of Social and Civic Growth

Abstract

The study uses the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education to test how arts attendance in college facilitates growth in socially responsible leadership, diversity orientation, and the importance of political and social involvement. The study uses the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) and the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale (M-GUDS) to understand changes in socially responsible leadership and orientation toward diversity. Using the quasi-experimental design of inverse treatment probability weighting with doubly robust estimation, the analyses indicate that arts attendance in the first year of college has a positive dosage effect on student-rated importance of social and political involvement, increases the SRLS score of those attending arts events very often, and improves students’ M-GUDS score among those attending often. Finally, arts attendance at any level has a positive influence on students’ interest in participating in diverse social and cultural activities. We provide additional analyses concerning SRLS and M-GUDS sub-scales.