Author
Summary
A new report from Arts for Health reveals that engaging with the arts and culture generally has a positive long-term effect on health and wellbeing.The prevailing narrative in UK policy-making circles is that we lack evidence around howengagement in the arts – as an audience member and/or practitioner – affects our physical andpsychological health over time. Between February and July 2014, research was conductedwhich sought to address this perceived deficit in several ways.In the first place, this research adopted an international perspective to locate andcritically analyse those English-language studies to have explored the associationbetween arts engagement and health. This gave rise to an evidence base, comprisedof fifteen studies, which collectively suggest that arts engagement has a beneficialimpact upon health over time. This observation, made in relation to a range of chronicdiseases, prompted a detailed consideration of the likely physiological and molecularbiological mechanisms underlying any positive results.Attention was then turned to the likelihood of replicating and elaborating upon theseresults. This necessitated a critical appraisal of the population-based datasetsunderpinning international studies and a consideration of their UK comparators.Complemented by detailed consultation with leading researchers in the field, this part ofthe project yielded a series of recommendations for future analyses of the relationshipbetween arts engagement and health in the UK and beyond. This takes account ofthe potential for further longitudinal studies, intervention into the surveys making upthe relevant datasets and an ambitious new biomedical analysis. In this effort, it issuggested, attention will need to be paid to persistent inequalities of access to the arts,health and economic resources. It is to be hoped that past and future research in thisarea will provide the necessary evidence for policy-makers to invest in high-quality artsactivities well beyond the clinical environment.
Subjects
Link
http://www.artsforhealth.org/research/artsengagementandhealth/
Notes
Refers to: Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L. and Dolan, P. (2014) ‘Quantifying the social impacts of culture and sport’. London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Refers to: Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L. and Dolan, P. (2014) ‘Quantifying and valuing the wellbeing impacts of culture and sport’. London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport.