Professor Marc Verboord of the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, together with colleagues from the international research project INVENT, shows that there is a positive effect of participation in cultural activities and conversations on how people feel in daily life.
What effect cultural participation has on people's emotional well-being is a question that has long preoccupied cultural researchers. However, it is difficult to find hard evidence of causal effects. Much research works with surveys, interviews, small-scale interventions, or experiments in an artificial setting. In an innovative research design, Verboord and colleagues used experience sampling methodology to establish causal effects.
Asking questions via smartphone
More than 270 study participants completed up to 28 mini-questionnaires over the course of a week, sent to them at random times via their smartphones. This created a semi-experimental design that allowed feelings to be compared between times when people had, and times when they had not, participated in culture. Because the questions were about their behaviour and feelings in daily life as they experienced them at that moment, the results are more ecologically valid than in a laboratory experiment.
Culture activities and conversations encourage feeling good
The results show that people feel significantly better when they have just done something cultural than when they have not. This is true for both activities and conversations. Moreover, we see the effects for both popular culture and traditional culture.
The research was done in the Horizon2020 project ‘European Inventory of Societal Values of Culture as Basis for Inclusive Cultural Policies’ (INVENT, http://inventculture.eu), which investigated how European citizens experience and use culture, and developed new methods to capture the social value of culture, and ultimately promote inclusiveness, tolerance and well-being in society.
The article was published in Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts.
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