Abstract
BackgroundArts engagement within communities is ubiquitous across cultures globally and previous research has suggested its benefits for mental health and wellbeing. However, it remains unclear whether these benefits are driven by arts engagement itself or by important confounders such as socio-economic status (SES), childhood arts engagement, previous mental health, personality, or self-selection bias. The aim of this study is to use fixed effects models that account for unidentified time-constant confounding measures to examine the longitudinal association between arts (frequency of both arts participation and cultural attendance), mental distress, mental health functioning and life satisfaction.MethodsData from 23,660 individuals (with a mean age of 47 years) included in the UK Understanding Society wave 2 (2010–2012) and wave 5 (2013–2015) were analyzed. Aside from controlling for all time-constant variables using fixed-effects models, we additionally adjusted for time-varying demographic factors (e.g. age and marital status), health behaviors and social support variables.ResultsAfter controlling for all time-constant variables and identified time-varying confounders, frequent arts participation and cultural attendance were associated with lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of life satisfaction, with arts participation additionally associated with better mental health functioning. Health-related and social time-varying factors were shown partly but not wholly to explain the observed associations.ConclusionArts engagement amongst the population as a whole may help enhance positive mental health and life satisfaction, and protect against mental distress. These results are independent of a wide range of time-constant confounding factors.
Highlights
Arts engagement within communities is ubiquitous across cultures globally and previous research has suggested its benefits for mental health and wellbeing
People who were frequently engaged in arts had lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of mental functioning and life satisfaction than those who were infrequently engaged as well as better health behaviors, more social support from family and friends, and higher socioeconomic status
Mental distress When adjusting for all identified confounders, significantly lower levels of mental distress were found amongst those who participated in arts activities more than once a week, or who attended cultural events once a week or more (Table 2)
Summary
Arts engagement within communities is ubiquitous across cultures globally and previous research has suggested its benefits for mental health and wellbeing. A challenge in studies that have been conducted is accounting for confounding factors that could explain any association between arts engagement and both mental health and wellbeing, especially as many of these confounders include complex individual traits and previous life experiences that can be hard to capture fully. As these factors are all themselves associated with mental health, it is possible that associations between arts and mental health could be due to individual confounding factors [28, 29] This is the case both for intervention studies, for which selfselection bias is likely to predispose individuals with higher levels of cultural capital, greater past experience, better previous mental health and open personality types to take part, and for analyses of observational data. Even longitudinal analyses observational data that adjust for such factors still may not entirely remove their effects [31]
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