Ukulélé — photo by flickr user oh_debby

In a perfect world, who should have access to the arts? Among artists, arts administrators, and arts educators the answer is likely to be unanimous: “Everyone!” And yet for the most part, that conviction is based on little more than gut instinct and personal experience. Do we actually have any evidence that people are happier with their lives for having art in it?

Those of you who read Createquity’s recent article on television and wellbeing might have noticed an interesting tidbit: according to our analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, there is no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life, after controlling for factors such as health and income. Left unexplored by that analysis, however, was the question of more active forms of participation – i.e., creation and performance. Enter “Artful Living,” a recent paper from Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Not only does the 2014 study reveal a positive correlation between several forms of active participation and life satisfaction (which some scientists refer to as “subjective wellbeing”), it finds that some forms of art increase people’s wellbeing more than others, and that the arts improve some people’s lives more noticeably than others, too.

In “Artful Living,” Steven Tepper and his team examine the relationship between several creative pastimes and subjective wellbeing, and compare findings across demographic groups. The authors focus specifically on “artistic practice” (including activities such as playing a musical instrument and craft-making), rather than more passive forms of arts participation, such as attendance and reception.

Drawing on data from three national surveys, the researchers find a generally positive relationship between maintaining an artistic practice and various measures of subjective wellbeing. For instance, using a dataset of over 20,000 responses to the DDB Needham Life Style Survey of consumer attitudes in the U.S., the authors find that all three of the artistic practices examined (playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making) are all positively associated with life satisfaction. Moreover, life satisfaction increases with greater frequency of participation in any of these activities. While the relationships are positive across the board, there are considerable differences between those three practices: the wellbeing gains associated with playing an instrument are almost twice as large as those for craft-making.

Besides the differences across artistic practices, the researchers observe that these positive correlations are more pronounced among women and people of color than their male and white counterparts. The relationships are particularly strong for women engaged in craft-making and gardening and people of color who either play an instrument or garden. The authors theorize that this might be attributed to certain benefits of artistic practice like self-expression and a greater sense of personal control and efficacy, which might be particularly helpful for improving the wellbeing of historically marginalized groups.

In addition to the DDB data, the Curb Center researchers analyzed data from a survey of 1,700 college seniors at nine institutions (the Double Major Student Survey) and from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which surveyed slightly more than 4,000 graduates from 76 art colleges. The results from the Double Major Student Survey lead the authors to conclude that students who engage in arts activities have a more positive self-image and social outlook. The SNAAP data indicates higher levels of life satisfaction among former arts students who have continued their artistic practice, but only among those who feel that they have adequate time to practice their art. Those who continue to create art but feel they don’t have enough time to do so report lower levels of life satisfaction than arts graduates who gave up their creative work entirely.

While these findings are intriguing, it is difficult to say how meaningful these associations are, as the effect sizes are fairly small. The developed models include variables such as age, race, gender, income, employment status, and marital status, plus data on respondents’ artistic practice. All of these variables together only explain about 8 to 13 percent of respondents’ subjective wellbeing.

The authors try to contextualize the size of the wellbeing increases associated with an artistic practice by stating that the increases are comparable to or greater than those that result from being married or having children. That seems pretty impressive at first glance, until one thinks about the fact that over 30 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that spending quality time with a crying newborn at 2am is a decidedly mixed blessing. It turns out that the ups and downs of these life-changing events are reflected in wellbeing surveys: the impact of marriage on wellbeing is fairly mixed, and while individual studies have conflicting results, it seems like levels of life satisfaction generally aren’t so different for parents and non-parents.

A more helpful point of comparison is provided in a study that compares the wellbeing impacts of sports and cultural engagement in the U.K., which came out the same year as “Artful Living.” As in “Artful Living,” the British researchers found a positive, statistically-significant relationship between artistic endeavors and life satisfaction. However, the increase in life satisfaction associated with arts engagement is slightly lower than that of participation in sports. This certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, but it demonstrates how comparisons can be used to make the effect sizes intelligible.

Even with these caveats, “Artful Living” serves as a great example of exploratory work demonstrating the relationship between the arts and wellbeing in the U.S. It also gives us valuable insight into the varying effects of artistic practice on different populations. As always, additional research would be useful. While experimental methods would be desirable, incorporating more forms of artistic practice within a general population survey like the DDB Needham Lifestyle Survey might be an excellent first start. In the meantime, “Artful Living” is notable for taking the challenge of measuring the wellbeing impact of the arts head on, and lays a helpful foundation for future research.

“Taiwanese Performance” by East-West Center

Title: Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

Author(s): Maria Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, and Joaquin Herranz

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2006

URL: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/cultural-vitality-communities-interpretation-and-indicators

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

Methods: literature review, indicator construction using existing data

What it Says: This report builds on the Arts and Culture Community Indicator Project (ACIP)’s 2002 study, “Culture Counts in Communities.” In this report, ACIP introduces the term “cultural vitality” and defines it as follows: “Cultural vitality is the evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in communities.”

The authors find that while a growing number of urban and community indicator systems are including arts and culture both in the US and abroad, the definitions of arts and culture that are used are rather narrow, traditional definitions.

Of the four domains laid out in the 2002 framework, the authors only consider three appropriate for measurement through indicators: presence, participation, and support systems.

The indicators they propose are:

Presence of Opportunities for Cultural Participation

• Nonprofit, public, and commercial arts-related organizations
• Retail arts venues (bookstores, music stores, film theaters, craft and art supply stores)
• Non-arts venues with arts and cultural programming (parks, libraries, ethnic associations, societies, and centers)
• Festivals and parades
• Arts-focused media outlets (print and electronic, including web-based venues)
• Art schools

Participation

• Amateur art making
• Collective/community art making
• K-12 arts education
• Arts after-school programs
• Audience participation
• Purchase of artistic goods (materials for making art as well as final arts products)
• Discourse about arts and culture in the media

Support

• Public expenditures in support of the arts in all sectors (nonprofit, public, and commercial)
• Foundation expenditures in support of the arts (nonprofit, public, and commercial)
• Volunteering and personal giving to the arts
• Presence of working artists
• Integration of arts and culture into other policy areas and corresponding allocation of resources (e.g., community development, education, parks and recreation, etc.)

The authors go on to describe what types of data would be necessary (and what limited data is currently available) to include arts and culture in quality of life indicators. Among the currently available data they distinguish between four “tiers”, based on factors such as whether the data is publicly accessible, nationally comparable, locally generated, sporadic or recurrent, quantitative or qualitative.

They have been unable to identify any Tier 1 data (publicly accessible, nationally comparable) for the indicators in the Participation domain. In fact, they only have Tier 1 measures for seven of the indicators: four for the Presence and three for the Support domain.

In later sections of the report, the authors describe individual communities based on indicators from across several “tiers” of data, and compare the cultural vitality of several US Metro Areas based on the available “Tier 1 data”.

What I think about it: The proposed indicators are a mix of outputs (presence, support) and outcomes (participation). The indicator system proposed here doesn’t actually demonstrate that cultural vitality contributes to wellbeing. Based on an admittedly cursory review of the report, this seems to be taken for granted (a closer read would be necessary to fully assess this point).

Several of the indicators still lack definition, so that comparisons across communities would involve a lot of judgement calls (e.g., at which point does an ethnic association provide enough cultural programming to be counted as a cultural entity?).

What it all means: It seems to me that the general approach of thinking about the arts in relation to community development and the expanded definition of cultural activity/participation proposed by ACIP are the most significant portions of this study. The actual indicator system proposed here probably does as well as one can with the available data, but as a model it seems neither fully developed conceptually nor well tested as of 2006.

“Atto primo ▼ Picnic” by BAAM Milano

Title: Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement

Author(s): Maria Rosario Jackson and Joaquin Herranz

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2002

URL: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/culture-counts-communities

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

Methods: Literature review, consultations (interviews and focus groups) with experts and community members

What it says: The Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP) was launched in 1996. “Recognizing that arts and culture had too frequently been neglected in efforts to assess quality of life” the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the Urban Institute to “explore the possibility of integrating arts and culture-related measures into neighborhood indicator systems.”

The researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with arts professionals and community residents, and reviewed the available literature. They found that there is neither much empirical data nor theoretical work on the ways in which arts and cultural participation contribute to social dynamics, and the data that is available primarily focuses on formal arts and culture venues. Since the existing research is insufficient as the basis for an indicator system, the authors propose principles and parameters for research and measurement that were developed through a series of workshops and conferences.

The authors present four “guiding principles” for indicator development in communities, which highlight the need to allow the communities that are being studied to define “arts,” “culture,” and “creativity” in ways that are appropriate for their community, the need to be open to broad definitions of participation and the multiplicity of meanings art can have simultaneously, and the fact that opportunities to participate require both arts and non-arts resources.

They go on to propose a conceptual framework that has four domains:

• presence (qualitative and quantitative cultural inventorying)
• participation
• impacts (contribution to community building outcomes)
• systems of support

Regarding the impact domain, the authors point out that the necessary fuzziness around the definition of arts, culture and creativity make it difficult to pinpoint their impact on community building outcomes.

While the data is considered inadequate to support any definitive conclusions, the authors identify “a list of important impacts that participation in arts, culture, and creativity at the neighborhood level may have” [emphasis added] based on their review of the literature. Directly or indirectly, the arts, culture, and creativity may contribute to

• supporting civic participation and social capital;
• catalyzing economic development;
• improving the built environment;
• promoting stewardship of place;
• augmenting public safety;
• preserving cultural heritage;
• bridging cultural/ethnic/racial boundaries;
• transmitting cultural values and history;
• creating group memory and group identity.

The authors acknowledge that their principles and conceptual framework are just a beginning and that further theoretical development and empirical research is necessary.

What I think about it: This is an important initiative/study that shifted the conversations about arts in communities by introducing expanded definitions of participation and including practitioners and community members in the research/definition of outcomes. It’s really at the beginning of the whole creative placemaking conversation.

Nonetheless, there are some weaknesses: The “Systems of Support” domain in the ACIP framework seems like a measure of outputs rather than outcomes. The same might be said about the mere “presence” of cultural opportunities. Moreover, in the discussion of potential impacts that the arts have on communities little attention is paid to the fact that arts and culture can also work in the opposite direction: they can increase cultural/ethnic/racial boundaries, obscure cultural values and history, etc.

What it all means: ACIP’s objective of including arts and culture in systems of quality of life indicators parallels our work on wellbeing at Createquity, but since they’re focused on neighborhoods it’s not clear that much of their work would carry over to assessments of wellbeing at the national level. For instance, ACIP’s desire to let the communities under investigation develop their own definitions of “arts,” “culture,” and “creativity,” and set their own indicators of cultural participation may make sense at the neighborhood level, but it would be extremely difficult to arrive at a national consensus on these matters through community consultations. Similarly, it is easier to imagine incorporating qualitative data that sheds light on local history and local cultural meanings in the context of neighborhoods than in national indicator systems.

“Livskvalitet/Quality of life” by Gunilla G

Quality of Life, Wellbeing, and Standard of Living: Definitions and Common Usage

In embarking on our exploration of the arts and wellbeing, we researched formal definitions and common usage of several overlapping terms used in this larger field of inquiry: wellbeing, quality of life, and standard of living.

We found that there is a good deal of ambiguity around the meanings of these terms, and this lack of conceptual clarity has been called out repeatedly over the past 50 years. While we felt that the details of this debate were too esoteric to address in our feature article (which is intended for a broad audience of generalists), we want to make this information and our current understanding of the terms available to our dedicated Createquity Insider readers.

While antecedents of the social indicators movement can be traced back to the 1920s and 30s, efforts to measure how well people are doing really took off in the 1960s. Part of the ambiguity surrounding the concepts and terminology used to describe the objects of study results from the fact that researchers in several different fields—as varied as public health, economics, and psychology—took an interest in measuring wellbeing around the same time and without much exchange with their colleagues in other disciplines.

As early as 1973, researchers criticized the lack of conceptual clarity around the terms “quality of life” and “wellbeing.” David M. Smith argued that “wellbeing” should exclusively be used in reference to objective measures of a population’s living conditions, whereas “quality of life”—which to Smith held more evaluative connotations—should be used in reference to people’s self-reported, subjective assessments of their lives.

Despite Smith’s admonitions, it seems that the situation hadn’t improved much by the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Barbara K. Haas asserted that “the terms QOL [quality of life], satisfaction with life, functional status, and well-being can no longer be used interchangably.” Haas considered wellbeing to be one of a number of components of the larger concept quality of life, and contrary to Smith, she held that wellbeing should be reserved for subjective assessments of people’s lives.

A more recent attempt to disentangle the concept of wellbeing from that of quality of life from André Langlois and Dale Anderson defines both concepts as relationships between individuals and their environments. Quality of life is located in the objective realm, at the intersection of individual needs and external resources. Meanwhile, wellbeing results from the ability to take advantage of the available resources and experience satisfaction, which, again, places wellbeing in the subjective realm.

As of yet, it doesn’t seem that any of the attempts to tease out differences between wellbeing and quality of life and bring conceptual clarity to their definitions have had a lasting effect. In many instances the two terms continue to be used interchangeably. However, while there seems to be a general consensus that quality of life consists of both subjective and objective components, there is greater ambivalence about the meaning of wellbeing. Some authors use wellbeing as a synonym for quality of life and others use it in Haas’s sense to refer exclusively to self-reported, subjective assessments of people’s lives.

In the latter case, “wellbeing” might be said to function as shorthand for “subjective wellbeing,” another term that frequently appears in the literature. While there is controversy over the precise definition of “subjective wellbeing” as well (e.g., whether it refers to the affective experience of “happiness,” the cognitive assessment of satisfaction with one’s life, or a combination of both), the use of “subjective wellbeing” at least clarifies that objective measures (income, physical health, etc.) are not included in the mix.

“Standard of living” rarely appears in the controversies over the proper definitions and measurement techniques for wellbeing and quality of life. Indeed, there appears to be greater agreement about the definition of “standard of living.” The term generally refers to the wealth, material goods, and comforts available to an individual or a group, often simply measured as GDP per capita. In some cases, composite measures are developed to assess standards of living, but even then the constructs tend to be limited to objective measures, and primarily ones related to income and material wealth.

Studies of wellbeing and quality of life have garnered a lot of attention in recent years, in part because there is a growing consensus that the broad economic measures used to assess standard of living are unable tell the full story of how well people or countries are doing relative to others. However, standard of living has the benefit of conceptual clarity, and even crude measures such as GDP continue to be of significant influence in policy debates.

In drafting our article on wellbeing and the arts, we decided to treat wellbeing (in its broad sense) and quality of life as essentially equivalent, but to use wellbeing as the default term. However, since the article was published, we’ve come to understand that many readers primarily associate wellbeing with physical health and may have found our usage confusing.

Since we’re considering the improvement of overall wellbeing as a key function of a healthy arts ecosystem and thus central to Createquity’s mission, we’re likely to be discussing these issues in one form or another for years to come. Accordingly, we’re now considering reversing course and switching our terminology to quality of life, which may be more readily understood. Quality of life also has the advantage of clearly evoking a dimension of value that is complementary to measures like “lives saved.” Indeed, composite metrics like Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) provide an example of how quality of life has been used in very real and consequential day-to-day decisions (though not without controversy). As we contemplate this change, we’d appreciated input from Insider readers to get a sense of your interpretation of the terms.

References

BusinessDictionary.com, s.v. “standard of living.” http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/standard-of-living.html.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Wellbeing Concepts.” http://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/wellbeing.htm.

Dodge, Rachel, Annette P. Daly, Jan Huyton, and Lalage D. Sanders. “The Challenge of Defining Wellbeing.” International Journal of Wellbeing 2, no. 3 (2012): 222–35. Available at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwiwkce3quLJAhUjzoMKHe7EASsQFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org%2Findex.php%2Fijow%2Farticle%2FviewFile%2F89%2F238%3Forigin%3Dpublication_detail&usg=AFQjCNF8fycR8DBb54bxf98Z4c4bd2s34A&sig2=zociomrBjOuNXVhuX8-Vdg.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “How Do We Measure Standard of Living?” The Ledger (Winter 2003). Available at http://www.bostonfed.org/education/ledger/ledger03/winter/.

Fontinelle, Amy. “Standard Of Living Vs. Quality Of Life,” on Investopedia. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/standard-of-living-quality-of-life.asp.

Langlois, André, and Dale E. Anderson. “Resolving the Quality of Life/Well-Being Puzzle: Toward a New Model.” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 25, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 501–12. Available at www.cjrs-rcsr.org/archives/25-3/langlois.pdf.

Merriam-Webster online, s.v. “Standard of Living.”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/standard%20of%20living.

Noll, Heinz-Herbert. “Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research: Background, Achievements and Current Trends.” In Advances in Sociological Knowledge, edited by Nikolai Genov, 151–81. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004. Available at https://books.google.com/books?id=Rt6tBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT2&dq=advances+in+sociological+knowledge+2004&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDhbDywMbJAhVMjIMKHekhAT4Q6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=advances%20in%20sociological%20knowledge%202004&f=false.

Scottish Government, St Andrew’s House. “Quality of Life and Well-Being: Measuring the Benefits of Culture and Sport: Literature Review and Thinkpiece.” Research Publications, January 20, 2006. Available at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/13110743/0.

Wikipedia, s.v. “Standard of Living.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living#cite_ref-1.

Wikipedia, s.v. “Quality-adjusted life year.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year.

“Qualitative research step by step” by Sam Ladner

This month we looked more closely at the idea of television addiction and the choices that people make with regard to their television viewing. The literature appears to agree that television addiction does exist, and that it describes a particular set of behaviors that resemble drug or alcohol addiction. We found that television choices are influenced by a variety of external factors, and the way that people justify or explain their television viewing to others is also affected by outside influences. The research indicates that for some people, television is a fulfilling activity that they actively choose from a set of other activities, but for others, television takes the place of other activities that would be more meaningful to them.

Gupta, V., Nwosa, N., Nadel, T., & Inamdar, S. (2001). Externalizing behaviors and television viewing in children of low-income minority parents. Clinical Pediatrics, 40(6), 337–41. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11824177

Hendriks Vettehen, P., Konig, R. P., Westerik, H., & Beentjes, H. (2012). Explaining television choices: The influence of parents and partners. Poetics, 40(6), 565–585. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X12000605

Horvath, C. W. (n.d.). Measuring Television Addiction. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48(3). Retrieved fromhttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15506878jobem4803_3?journalCode=hbem20#.Vji50KL88gg

Lampard, A., Jurkowski, J., & Davison, K. (2012). Social-cognitive predictors of low-income parents’ restriction of screen time among preschool-aged children. Health Education & Behavior: The Official Publication Of The Society For Public Health Education, 40(5), 526–30. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23239766

McCoy, C. A., & Scarborough, R. C. (2014). Watching “bad” television: Ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures. Poetics,47, 41–59. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X14000576

Simons, N. (2015). TV drama as a social experience: An empirical investigation of the social dimensions of watching TV drama in the age of non-linear television. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 40(2), 219–236. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/279280934_TV_drama_as_a_social_experience_An_empirical_investigation_of_the_social_dimensions_of_watching_TV_drama_in_the_age_of_non-linear_television

Sussman, S., & Moran, M. B. (2013). Hidden addiction: Television. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 2(3), 125–132. Retrieved from http://www.akademiai.com/doi/pdf/10.1556/JBA.2.2013.008

Thompson, D., Matson, P., & Ellen, J. (2013). Television viewing in low-income latino children: variation by ethnic subgroup and English proficiency. Childhood Obesity, 9(1), 22–8. Retrieved from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/chi.2012.0113

Van der Goot, M., Beentjes, J. W. J., & van Selm, M. (2015). Older adults’ television viewing as part of selection and compensation strategies. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 40(1), 93–111. Retrieved fromhttp://www.researchgate.net/publication
/277930457_Older_adults_television_viewing_as_part_of_selection_and_compensation_strategies

Xu, J., Forman, C., Kim, J. B., & Van Ittersum, K. (2014). News Media Channels: Complements or Substitutes? Evidence from Mobile Phone Usage. Journal of Marketing, 78(4), 97–112. Retrieved from http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jm.13.0198

We also began conducting phone interviews with adults of low socio-economic status to investigate why people make the choices they do when it comes to watching television vs. attending arts events. This qualitative information will help us to flesh out the preliminary conclusions we arrived at in our feature article “Why Don’t They Come?” So far the interviews have been quite revealing in terms of what types of programs people like and deem relevant, as well as identifying barriers to entry or participation. We are currently seeking more interviewees, so if you or someone you know is above the age of 25 and has achieved some college or less, please email info@createquity.com with the subject line “TV Watcher” and we will be happy to schedule a 30 minute phone interview. In exchange for your/their time we can offer a small sum.

Meanwhile, we continued our bibliographic research on the history of change in the arts ecosystem in two areas: the expansion of the nonprofit arts sector and technological change and the arts. Given the breadth of the topics we’re addressing in these reviews, we’ve started to narrow our focus somewhat by prioritizing certain turning points, trends and developments, based on our preliminary review of the available literature. In the expansion of the nonprofit sector we are focusing on the are the growth of private and public funding for arts nonprofits since 1950 and professionalization within the nonprofit arts sector. We are currently prioritizing and reviewing resources that were added to Zotero last month during our initial scan of the literature. In the technology area, our research has focused primarily on music this month. New additions to our Zotero library in this area include:

Aguiar, Luis, and Bertin Martens. “Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data.” Digital Economy Working Paper. European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, 2013. tp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC79605.pdf.

Albright, Dann. “The Evolution of Music Consumption: How We Got Here.” MakeUseOf, April 30, 2015. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-evolution-of-music-consumption-how-we-got-here/.

Bahanovich, David, and Dennis Collopy. “Music Experience and Behaviour in Young People 2009 and 2011.” University of Hertfordshire’s Music and Entertainment Industries Research Group.

Bert Weijters, Frank Goedertier. “Online Music Consumption in Today’s Technological Context: Putting the Influence of Ethics in Perspective.” Journal of Business Ethics 124, no. 4 (2014): 537–50.

Beuscart, Jean-Samuel, and Thomas Couronné. “The Distribution of Online Reputation: Audience and Influence of Musicians on MySpace.” Proceedings of the Third International ICWSM Conference (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), 2009.

“Edison Research Conducts First Ever Share of Ear Measurement For All Forms Of Online And Offline Audio – Edison Research.” http://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-research-conducts-first-ever-share-of-ear-measurement-for-all-forms-of-online-and-offline-audio/.

Huang, Chun-Yao. “File Sharing as a Form of Music Consumption.” International Journal of Electronic Commerce 9, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 37–55.

“IFPI DIgital Music Report 2015: Charting the Path to Sustainable Growth,” 2015.
Madden, Mary. “The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster.” Pew Research Center, June 15, 2009. http://www.pewinternet.org/2009/06/15/the-state-of-music-online-ten-years-after-napster/.

Midem, and Nielsen. “The Hyper‐fragmentedworld of Music: Marketing Considerations and Revenue Maximisation,” 2011. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2011/hyper-fragmented-world-of-music.html.

Morris, Jeremy Wade. Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture. Univ of California Press, 2015.
Nielsen. “2014 Nielsen Music U.S. Report,” 2014.

O’Hara, Kenton, Barry Brown, and Michael Bull, eds. “Investigating the Culture of Mobile Listening: From Walkman to iPod.” InConsuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies. Springer Science & Business Media, 2006.

Prior, Nick. “The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production.” https://www.academia.edu/354591/The_Rise_of_the_New_Amateurs_Popular_Music_Digital_Technology_and_the_Fate_of_Cultural_Production.

Suskind, Alex. “15 Years After Napster: How the Music Service Changed the Industry.” The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/06/15-years-after-napster-how-the-music-service-changed-the-industry.html.

Tavana, Art. “Democracy of Sound: Is GarageBand Good for Music?” Pitchfork, September 30, 2015. http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9728-democracy-of-sound-is-garageband-good-for-music/.

Tschmuck, Peter. “Is Streaming the Next Big Thing? – What Consumers Want | Music Business Research.” https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/is-streaming-the-next-big-thing-what-consumers-want/.

Voida, Amy, Rebecca E. Grinter, and Nicholoas Ducheneaut. “Social Practices around iTunes.” In Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies, edited by Kenton O’Hara and Barry Brown. Springer Science & Business Media, 2006.

Witt, Stephen. How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. New York: Viking, 2015.

———. “The Man Who Broke the Music Business: The Dawn of Online Piracy.” The New Yorker, April 27, 2015.http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business.

“Study” by Moyan Brenn

This past month, Createquity continued conducting research for our follow-up to the article “Why Don’t They Come?” and our investigation of the history of change in the arts ecosystem over the past half-century.

Arts and Economic Disadvantage

This month, we looked closely at studies exploring reasons for lack of interest among people who do not attend arts events. To this end, a series of case studies from the Wallace Foundation on building new arts audiences shed light on how arts organizations have successfully attracted new audiences from groups with historically low attendance rates. Common themes in these case studies included revisiting marketing approaches to attract new audiences, finding ways to make sure that the arts content was relevant to the target audiences, and ensuring that audiences felt as though they had friends at the organization.

Additionally, we have begun to investigate why people make the choice to watch television, including whether or not people consciously choose to watch television over participating in arts activities, and why. To investigate this question, we are reading literature on how and why people make the choice to watch television.

To inform our thinking on this article, we’ve been attempting to identify interview subjects from the target population of low-SES adults who watch several hours of television a day. We have posted flyers in public libraries and on craigslist in several cities. Several people have responded to the query, and we are determining next steps for outreach.

Below are the articles and reports that we have reviewed this month:

Harlow, B. (2015). Staying Relevant in a Changing Neighborhood: How Fleisher Art Memorial is Adapting to Shifting Community Demographics. New York, NY: Wallace Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Documents/Staying-Relevant-in-a-Changing-Neighborhood-How-Fleisher-Art-Memorial-is-Adapting-to-Shifting-Community-Demographics.pdf

Harlow, B., & Cox Roman, C. (2015). Someone Who Speaks Their Language: How a Nontraditional Partner Brought New Audiences to Minnesota Opera. New York, NY: Wallace Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Documents/Someone-Who-Speaks-Their-Language.pdf

Harlow, B., & Heywood, T. (2015a). Getting Past “It’s Not For People Like Us”: Pacific Northwest Ballet Builds a Following with Teens and Young Adults. Wallace Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Documents/Getting-Past-Its-Not-For-People-Like-Us.pdf

Harlow, B., & Heywood, T. (2015b). Opening New Doors: Hands-on Participation Brings a New Audience to a Clay Studio. New York, NY: Wallace Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Documents/Opening-New-Doors-Hands-On-Participation-Brings-a-New-Audience-to-The-Clay-Studio.pdf

Lee, B., & Lee, R. S. (1995). How and Why People Watch TV: Implications for the Future of Interactive Television: Implications for the Future of Interactive Television. Journal of Advertising Research, 35(6). Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/242362719_How_and_why_people_watch_TV_Implications_for_the_future_of_interactive_television

Rosenstein, C. (2005). Diversity and Participation in the Arts: Insights from the Bay Area. The Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/311252-Diversity-and-Participation-in-the-Arts.PDF

Stevens, L. K. (1996). Motivating opera attendance : comparative qualitative research in 10 North American cities, 1996. Washington, D.C.: ArtsMarket Consulting. Retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/motivating-opera-attendance-comparative-qualitative-research-in-10-north-american-cities-1996/oclc/35633527

History of Change in the Arts Ecosystem

We launched into bibliographic research in all three of our focus areas this month. The process is still very much underway (particularly in the “Expansion of the Definition of Art” and the “Technology” areas) and we appreciate any additional suggestions that Createquity Insider readers might want to add to our list. Here’s what we’ve dug up so far (grouped by content area):

Change Area 1: Expansion of the nonprofit arts infrastructure as seen in the proliferation of nonprofit arts organizations, government arts agencies, and philanthropic support, as well as growth in the number of arts administrators

Abramson, Alan J. “Nonprofit Sector and the New Federal Budget, The.” Text, January 1, 1986. http://webarchive.urban.org/publications/201452.html.

Burlingame, Dwight. Philanthropy in America: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Chartrand, Harry Hillman. “Toward an American Arts Industry.” The Public Life of the Arts in America, 2000, 22–49.

Cherbo, Joni Maya, and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski. The Public Life of the Arts in America. Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Constantino, Tracie. “The Impact of Philanthropy on Arts Education Policy.” Arts Education Policy Review 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2003): 25–32. doi:10.1080/10632910309600749.

“Cultural Economics: The Arts, the Heritage and the Media Industries. Volume 2.,” 1997, xi + 769 pp.

Curti, Merle. “The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research.” The American Historical Review, 1957, 352–63.

Dewey, Patricia. “From Arts Management to Cultural Administration.” International Journal of Arts Management 6 (2004): 13–23.

DiMaggio, Paul J., and Helmut K. Anheier. “The Sociology of Nonprofit Organizations and Sectors.” Annual Review of Sociology 16 (January 1, 1990): 137–59.

Gray, Charles M., and James Heilbrun. “Economics of the Nonprofit Arts.” The Public Life of the Arts in America, 2000, 202.

Hall, Peter Dobkin. “A Historical Overview of Philanthropy, Voluntary Associations, and Nonprofit Organizations in the United States, 1600–2000.” The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook 2 (2006): 32–65.

———. “Historical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations in the United States.” The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management 2 (2005): 3–38.

———. “ Inventing the Nonprofit Sector” and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations. JHU Press, 2001. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=T36LiAL1bGAC&oi=fnd&pg=PP7&dq=%22nonprofit+organizations%22+infrastructure+history&ots=NgdmM_rWvX&sig=iy9vneIATjEF_vbG13ocSAEJAhY.

Hammack, David C. “Nonprofit Organizations in American History Research Opportunities and Sources.” American Behavioral Scientist 45, no. 11 (July 1, 2002): 1638–74. doi:10.1177/0002764202045011004.

Hansmann, Henry. “Nonprofit Enterprise in the Performing Arts.” The Bell Journal of Economics 12, no. 2 (October 1, 1981): 341–61. doi:10.2307/3003560.

Hutchens, James, and Vivian Zöue. “Curricular Considerations in Arts Administration: A Comparison of Views from the Field.” Journal of Arts Management and Law 15, no. 2 (June 1, 1985): 7–22. doi:10.1080/07335113.1985.9942154.

Hwang, Hokyu, and Walter W. Powell. “The Rationalization of Charity: The Influences of Professionalism in the Nonprofit Sector.” Administrative Science Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 268–98. doi:10.2189/asqu.2009.54.2.268.

Ivey, Bill. “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts.” Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 22 (2005): B6–9.

Jeffri, Joan. “Philanthropy and the American Artist: A Historical Overview.” The European Journal of Cultural Policy 3, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 207–33. doi:10.1080/10286639709358046.

Markusen, Ann, Sam Gilmore, Amanda Johnson, Titus Levi, and Andrea Martinez. “Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Nonprofit, and Community Work,” 2006. http://works.bepress.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/amanda_johnson1/3/.

McCarthy, Kathleen D. “American Cultural Philanthropy: Past, Present, and Future.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 471 (January 1, 1984): 13–26.

McCarthy, Kevin F., Elizabeth Heneghan Ondaatje, and Jennifer L. Novak. Arts and Culture in the Metropolis. Rand Corporation, 2007. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG477.

Mulcahy, Kevin V. “The State Arts Agency: An Overview of Cultural Federalism in the United States.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 32, no. 1 (2002): 67–80.

Murphy, Thomas P. “Internships and the Professionalization of Arts Administration.” Performing Arts Review 7, no. 3 (July 1, 1977): 328–55. doi:10.1080/00315249.1977.9943419.

O’Neill, Michael. Nonprofit Nation: A New Look at the Third America. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Powell, Walter W., and Richard Steinberg. The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook. Yale University Press, 2006.

Salamon, Lester M. “The Nonprofit Sector at a Crossroads: The Case of America.” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 10, no. 1 (March 1999): 5–23. doi:10.1023/A:1021435602742.

Toepler, Stefan, and Annette Zimmer. “The State and the Non‐profit Sector in the Provision of Arts and Culture: The Cases of Germany and the United States.” The European Journal of Cultural Policy 3, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 289–304. doi:10.1080/10286639709358050.

Urice, John K. “The Future of the State Arts Agency Movement in the 1990s: Decline and Effect.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 22, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 19–32. doi:10.1080/10632921.1992.9944392.

Wyszomirski, Margaret Jane. “Philanthropy, the Arts, and Public Policy.” Journal of Arts Management and Law 16, no. 4 (January 1, 1987): 5–29. doi:10.1080/07335113.1987.9943084.

Change Area 2: Broadening of the definition of “art” in the nonprofit arts establishment to be more inclusive of non-European cultural traditions, popular culture, and new artistic disciplines

Banks, Mark, David Calvey, Julia Owen, and David Russell. “Where the Art Is: Defining and Managing Creativity in New Media SMEs.” Creativity and Innovation Management 11, no. 4 (2002): 255–64.

Crowther, Paul. “Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt,” 2007. http://philpapers.org/rec/CRODAC-2.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Penguin, 2005. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aAbqAGo5MwwC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=info:yBAdBtITDv4J:scholar.google.com&ots=XU490IwbyN&sig=pVNNzAFxgomd59nXYipzvDN1fAc.

Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution. Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jqb6WrXS68kC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=info:fqI-Jnj57qcJ:scholar.google.com&ots=Og4BnrMX_E&sig=273NaF3513P9kfzzOX5rUgO6H2Y.

Huber, Robert. “Defining Sculpture: Beyond the Expanded Field.” International Journal of the Arts in Society 6, no. 5 (2012). http://ija.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.85/prod.860.

Kim, Ji-Hoon. “Animating the Photographic Trace, Intersecting Phantoms with Phantasms: Contemporary Media Arts, Digital Moving Pictures, and the Documentary’s’ Expanded Field’.” Animation, 2011, 1746847711417780.

Lauter, Estella. “Re-Enfranchising Art: Feminist Interventions in the Theory of Art.” Hypatia 5, no. 2 (June 1, 1990): 91–106. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1990.tb00419.x.

Merritt, Davis. “Public Journalism-Defining a Democratic Art.” Media Studies Journal 9, no. 3 (1995): 125–32.

Rendell, Clare. “Sonia Delaunay and the Expanding Definition of Art.” Woman’s Art Journal, 1983, 35–38.

Rowe, Keri. “Elevating the Other: A Theoretical Approach to Alexander McQueen.” All Theses and Dissertations, March 1, 2015. http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4394.

Truxes, Anna. “The Art World Expanded.” The University of Utah, 2008. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=12732768178662981768&hl=en&oi=scholarr.

Wieand, Jeffrey. “Defining Art and Artifacts.” Philosophical Studies 38, no. 4 (1980): 385–89.

“Researching.” Photo by Steve Hanna

Our latest feature article, “Part of Your World,” explored the relationship between the arts and the meta-concept of wellbeing. While much of the work for this investigation occurred earlier this year, below are some new sources that we reviewed in preparation for the article.

Arts & Wellbeing Research Update

Cobb, C & Rixford C. (1998). Lessons learned from the history of social indicators. San Francisco, CA: Redefining Progress.

Dodge, R., Daly, A. P., Huyton, J., & Sanders, L. D. (2012). The challenge of defining wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(3), 222–235.

Easterlin, R. (1974). Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence. In David, P. A. & Reder, M. W. (Eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. New York. Retrieved from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin1974.pdf

Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.well-beingindex.com/

GDP: A Flawed Measure of Progress | New Economy Working Group. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org/visions/living-wealth-indicators/gdp-flawed-measure-progress

Langlois, A., & Anderson, D. E. (2002). Resolving the Quality of Life/Well-being Puzzle: Toward a New Model. Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 25(3), 501–512.

Noll, H. (2004). Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research: Background, Achievements and Current Trends. In N. Genov (Ed.), Advances in Sociological Knowledge (pp. 151–181). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

The Hangzhou Declaration: Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies. (2013). Presented at the Hangzhou International Conference China. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/images/FinalHangzhouDeclaration20130517.pdf

The Story of GNH | GNH Centre Bhutan. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/what-is-gnh/the-story-of-gnh/

Follow-Up Research on “Why Don’t They Come?” Update

Our research on the arts and wellbeing has led us in some interesting directions. After an initial scan and review of the literature on television, wellbeing, and the arts, we are drawing some initial conclusions about how television impacts health and subjective wellbeing. Our findings thus far include strong evidence that television is associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes, and not just because of sedentary behavior. Some researchers have suggested that the content of television that people watch and the behavior or mindsets it inspires might contribute to poor health.

The association between television and subjective wellbeing is a bit murkier. Researchers have pointed out that findings related to subjective wellbeing may seem counterintuitive because they don’t quite correlate with what you might expect to be significant drivers of wellbeing like income or health, which means that even though television might create poor health, it does not necessarily create poor subjective wellbeing. We can say with confidence that people tend to rate television relatively low compared to other activities, and that because it occupies such a significant portion of free time, television does tend to “crowd out” other, more satisfying activities. The overall effect on subjective wellbeing, however, remains somewhat unclear.

In the coming month, we plan to look more closely at our research questions related to the drivers of watching television vs. attending arts events among economically disadvantaged people. We will look at the degree to which this group is making a conscious choice to substitute television for attending arts events and will seek to better understand the lower interest in arts event attendance through market research analyses and interviews.

The articles and reports that we’ve read this month include:

Bruni, L., & Stanca, L. (2008). Watching Alone: Relational goods, television, and happiness. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 65(3-4), 506–528. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268106002095

Cardwell, S. (2014). Television Amongst Friends: Medium, Art, Media. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 9(3), 6–21. Retrieved from http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/manup/cstv/2014/00000009/00000003/art00002

Dempsey, P., Howard, B., Lynch, B., Owen, N., & Dunstan, D. W. (2014). Associations of television viewing time with adults’ well-being and vitality. Preventative Medicine. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25230366

Guetzkow, J. (2002). How the Arts Impact Communities: An Introduction to the Literature on Arts Impact Studies (No. 20). Taking the Measure of Culture Conference: Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. Retrieved from https://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP20%20-%20Guetzkow.pdf

Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2006). Would You Be Happier if You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion. Science, 312(5782), 1908–1910. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/312/5782/1908.short

Kataria, M., & Regner, T. (2011). A Note on the Relationship Between Television Viewing and Individual Happiness. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 40(1), 53–58. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535710000892

Muennig, P., Rosen, Z., & Johnson, G. (2013). Do the Psychological Risks Associated with Television Viewing Increase Mortality? Evidence from the 2008 General Social Survey – National Death Index dataset. Annals of Epidemiology, 23(6), 355–360. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662979/

Robinson, J. P., & Martin, S. (2008). What do Happy People Do? Social Indicators Research, 89(3), 565–571. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11205-008-9296-6

Schneider, L. (2013). A Note on Income Aspirations, Television, and Happiness. Kyklos, 66(2), 301–305. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12022/abstract

Uslaner, E. M. (1998). Social Capital, Television, and the “Mean World”: Trust, Optimism, and Civic Participation. Political Psychology, 19(3), 441–467. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3792173

Wheeler, K. S. (2015). The relationships Between Television Viewing, Behaviors, Attachment, Loneliness, Depression, and Psychological Well-Being (Undergraduate Honors Thesis). Georgia Southern University, Georgia. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/honors-theses/98/

World Health Organization. (2012). Social Determinants of Health and Well-Being Among Young People. Retrieved from http://www.hbsc.unito.it/it/images/pdf/hbsc/prelims-part1.pdf

Meanwhile, because of our recent focus on our investigation of wellbeing and the arts, we have been mostly in the research planning phase of our investigation into the history of change in the arts ecosystem.

History of Change in the Arts Ecosystem Research Update

Having identified three areas of the arts ecosystem that have experienced major changes over the past 50 years, we’ve assigned one member of our research team to conduct the initial bibliographic research in each area. Katie will be exploring the expansion of the nonprofit arts infrastructure, Fari will investigate the broadening of the definition of “art” in the nonprofit arts establishment, and John will be looking for literature on the impact that new technologies have had on both nonprofit and for-profit forms of expression.

To get an initial sense of the literature, we’re going to search Google Scholar and JSTOR, and add literature to our Zotero library based purely on titles and abstracts. In doing so, we’re going to keep track of the search terms we’ve used, monitor the time we’ve spent on each database, and make note of general observations.

After that we’ll discuss what additional research may be necessary. This might include searching additional databases (EBSCO Host, ProQuest Dissertations and Abstracts, ProQuest News and Newspapers, discipline specific databases), searches for books (Academic Library catalogs, WorldCat, Google Books), or specific academic journals that we should review. Alternatively, we might start pulling some of the literature and checking out the works they reference in their bibliographies.

• A large and emerging literature on the topic of wellbeing has a lot to teach us about the arts’ role in society.
• Wellbeing is a way of grouping the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella. This is important because it opens up the possibility of understanding the relative value or benefit of those components as part of an integrated whole instead of treating them as completely separate.
• A number of large-scale international economic and social policy initiatives are grounded in wellbeing, including much of the global development work undertaken by the United Nations.
• Most wellbeing definitions do not explicitly include culture, but some do. In particular, a variation of a wellbeing framework called the capability approach recognizes the capacity for imagination and play as critical components of human wellbeing.
• Describing the benefits and costs of arts ecosystem outcomes in the language of wellbeing could earn the field a proper seat at the table in conversations about human progress without downplaying the so-called “intrinsic” benefits of the arts.

* * *

Photo by Flickr user Tim Jordan. Creative Commons license.

Quick! What’s the most important issue in the arts? Is it declining audiences? The fact that it’s so hard to make a living as an artist? Changing demographics and cultural equity? Unsustainable business models? New technologies? Government funding? Arts education? Gentrification? Creative placemaking? Where I can go to figure out what the heck I’m doing this Friday night?

Spend any time reading up on arts policy and philanthropy or attending conferences in the arts, and you’ll see plenty of attention devoted to all of these topics and more. To be sure, all of them have implications for the future of arts and culture in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. The challenge is, with so many issues to track, and no way of comparing them to each other, we can’t know how to prioritize our limited energies in the areas that are going to make the most difference. We can’t even be sure that the biggest problems or opportunities in the sector are on our collective radar at all. What if the most impactful thing we could do is something that no one’s talking about?

At Createquity, we are trying to tackle that conundrum head-on by framing our work in terms of the broad language of social good and human progress. In this way we sometimes think of ourselves as a cause-specific analogue to the effective altruism movement, which tries to identify the highest-leverage opportunities to do the most good with the resources available to us, whatever they might be. Accordingly, when we developed our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, we declared that all of the conditions and outcomes named in that definition should be understood in the broader context of “improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways.” While that names a single yardstick of “life improvement” to measure every success against, without further elaborating on what it actually means to improve someone’s life, the concept is not very useful in practice. Fortunately, many smart people have been grappling with the same problem and have made significant strides towards adding specificity around such terms in recent decades. Our investigation of their work has led us to an exciting and emerging literature on the topic of wellbeing, a literature with roots in multiple fields outside of the arts.

Logo of the World Health Organization by United States Mission Geneva. Creative Commons license.

WELLBEING 101

While no consensus definition of wellbeing exists, broadly speaking, it is a way of holistically grouping the many components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella. The intellectual origins of wellbeing date back more than half a century to 1948, when the World Health Organization framed its definition of health not only in terms of the absence of troublesome physical symptoms, but also in terms of the presence of certain attributes that suggested “physical, mental, and social well-being.” This was a departure from the prevalent medical conception of health at the time, which narrowly focused on the presence or absence of disease and categories of ailments in individuals.

Before long, this holistic perspective began to infiltrate the study of whole communities and societies. An early theoretical work on “social indicators” in the United States was undertaken by Harvard Business School professor Raymond Bauer in the mid-1960s and sponsored (surprisingly enough) by NASA. With a large and visible public investment to protect, the space agency asked Bauer to quantify its effects on American life, but the professor concluded that the effort would not get far without an established way to quantify improvements to social conditions. To bridge that gap, Bauer and his co-authors pioneered the idea and early methods of developing statistical measures of social values and goals.

Bauer’s work coincided with a growing backlash against the then-commonplace use of economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure social progress in the national and international policy arena. While GDP is a broadly accepted way to measure the size of an economy, it is at best a flawed proxy for the outcomes that really signify how well societies are faring. In one of the more remarkable developments in the history of political economy, the teenage King Jigme Wangchuk of the small nation of Bhutan coined the term “Gross National Happiness” as a replacement for GDP in 1972. (Decades later, a fleshed-out version of GNH is in active use in the country and enshrined in its Constitution.) Around the same time, Richard Easterlin’s research on happiness levels in post-war Europe in suggested that increased material abundance did not necessarily yield increased happiness, which helped launch the field of happiness economics. By 2008, when the French government brought together a star-studded international panel of economists led by Nobel Prize winners Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to try to move beyond GDP once and for all, wellbeing was rapidly establishing itself as the dominant theoretical foundation of the global policy arena. The resulting Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission report is considered a major watershed in the mainstreaming of wellbeing.

Today, a large and growing field of study is devoted to wellbeing and its measurement, with its own peer-reviewed journals, leading experts, and esoteric controversies. Given that wellbeing scholars operate at the intersection of a number of different fields, it’s not surprising that the lexicon can sometimes get messy, with terms such as quality of life, standard of living, and livability variously standing in for the idea of a holistic measure of individual and community health. One of the more notable debates has centered around objective vs. subjective ways of conceptualizing wellbeing. Historically, a Scandinavian school of thought relied on living conditions such as income and physical health that can be observed directly, while an American “quality of life” approach focused on “subjective wellbeing” (i.e., asking people about their happiness, agency, and satisfaction with life). Advocates of the latter argue that subjective wellbeing is the most direct measure of an individual’s lived experience. Defining wellbeing solely in subjective terms may not tell the whole story, however, since people’s expectations for their own wellbeing may be affected by their context and past experiences. For example, individuals in societies with relative deprivation may rate their subjective wellbeing higher because their basis for comparison is different than people in relatively well-off societies, or a drug addict might report being very happy in the moment despite not leading a healthy life overall. These days, there is widespread agreement that a mix of objective and subjective measures is likely to provide the best understanding of wellbeing.

THE CAPABILITY APPROACH AND THE RISE OF INDICATOR SYSTEMS

The insight that neither objective nor subjective measures fully describe wellbeing on their own raises an important question: how does one account for people’s differing abilities or desires to make use of the resources provided them? Beginning in the 1980s, economist Amartya Sen began addressing this dilemma in earnest. His capability approach, refined in subsequent decades with philosopher Martha Nussbaum, frames wellbeing through the lens of social justice, taking the unique circumstances and choices of individuals into account. Among other things, the capability approach notes that:

Amartya Sen. Photo by Flickr user Stefano Corso. Creative Commons license.

• Individuals draw varying levels of benefit from the same resources. As a result, assessing wellbeing is much more complex than considering whether and how resources are distributed. It’s one thing to say, for example, that food is available to a particular population; it’s quite another to consider whether that food can actually nourish and sustain a pregnant woman or someone who is allergic to some of its core ingredients. As a result, the capability approach pays more attention to specific states of being (e.g., being nourished) and activities (e.g., learning) than to external inputs.
• Having the freedom to make choices matters. Whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their ability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing. The physical state of a person who is starving may be similar to that of someone who is fasting, but the right of the latter to choose his/her condition in an informed manner is crucial. Through this lens, all human beings must have the knowledge, skills, and opportunity to lead a meaningful life — beyond mere survival, a life “that they have reason to value.” Having the “capability” to achieve various states is therefore more significant than whether or not one actually achieves them.

Economists and international development scholars were quick to seize on Sen’s capability approach in their quest to break from an over-reliance on the GDP. As disillusioned as they were with standard macroeconomic measures, they knew that alternative metrics were needed in order for wellbeing to serve as a viable replacement. This gap led to a demand for new indicator systems that researchers and policymakers could use to translate quality of life into something that could be measured. Indicators, as they saw it, were necessary for wellbeing to move beyond a theoretical construct into something with practical significance. Beyond providing a means to count whether certain conditions are present, indicators could inform judgments about the success or failure of particular policy decisions, be used to hold people in power accountable to the impact of their work, and provide a common vocabulary by which nations, regions, or specific groups of people can track how they are faring.

In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UDNP), led by Pakistani scholar Mahbub ul Haq, began producing Human Development Reports meant to “shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people-centered policies.” In the process, they worked on a numerical index that could capture non-economic elements of wellbeing. Amartya Sen was involved; while he initially fretted that the capability approach was too complex to be boiled down to numbers, Haq and others eventually convinced him that policymakers would only take the capability approach seriously if a single index number was provided. Thus, the Human Development Index (HDI) was born.

The HDI is relatively simple. Its three dimensions are “a long and healthy life,” “being knowledgeable,” and a “decent standard of living.” The indicators are life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling for adults over 25 and expected years of schooling for young children (calculated via a mix of UNESCO statistics and actual enrollment figures), and gross national income per capita. The geometric mean of numerical scores from these four indicators comprise the final HDI index score for any particular country.

The United States fares quite well under this system, ranking fifth out of 187 nations in 2012-13. UNDP’s Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), however, tells a different story. It adjusts the HDI score based on the extent to which resources are more available to certain segments of the population than to others. (It uses a long list of surveys, including a few distributed by the World Bank and European Union, to do this.) A country with perfect equality would have identical HDI and IHDI scores. Across all countries in the survey, however, scores are adjusted by an average of 22%. Under IHDI, the United States’s ranking falls by more than twenty, while the remaining countries in the top five either hold their spots or shift by one or two.

The Human Development Index is just one example of a number of impressive, large-scale wellbeing indicator systems that have been developed in recent years. Below are a few of the more interesting and/or well-known efforts:

Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index

Claiming to be the “most proven, mature, and comprehensive measure of well-being in the world,” the Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index was unveiled in 2008 as a high-profile partnership between an international health care provider and arguably the best-known public opinion polling firm in the United States. Dubbed the “Dow Jones of health,” the index has a national and international version. The former measures life evaluation, physical health, emotional health, healthy behavior, work environment, and basic access via a 55-question survey distributed to 1,000 Americans per day. Its ultimate ambitions are to be “a daily measure determining the correlation between the places where people work and the communities in which they live, and how that and other factors impact their well-being.” The international edition is more modest, measuring five factors (purpose, social, financial, community, and physical) via ten specific questions included in Gallup’s World Poll, a monster survey that claims to represent 95% of the global population. Its reliance on self-reported perceptions of wellbeing sets it apart from other wellbeing indicators, and the impact of this difference in approach is notable: top Gallup-Healthways performers include a number of Latin American nations and territories such as Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Belize, Chile, and Guatemala that don’t tend to rank highly in the other indices.

Social Progress Index
The Social Progress Imperative

Billed as a “holistic, 21st century assessment of the health of society,” the Social Progress Imperative was launched six years ago by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Philanthropy and Social Investing with the goal of “spur[ring] competition between nations to improve the environment for social innovation in the way the [Global Competitiveness Index] has done for enablers of economic growth.” With seed funding from Fundación Avina and the Skoll Foundation, it launched its first research project, the Social Progress Index (SPI), in 2013. The SPI examines a whopping 54 environmental and and social indicators that fall under three broad dimensions: “basic human needs,” “foundations of wellbeing,” and “opportunity.” Unlike the HDI, the index does not take economic indicators like income into account, and also privileges outcomes (like the number of people who have access to clean water) over inputs (like policies aimed at increasing that access). Each dimension has four components that all have equal weight in determining the country’s overall score. Components include nutrition and medical care, access to knowledge, information, communications, and personal rights and freedoms. The Social Progress Imperative’s website breaks down each score with colors that indicate areas of relative strength and weakness when compared with other nations with similar GDP.

OECD Better Life Index
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

In contrast to the previous examples with their fixed metric definitions and weights, OECD’s Better Life Index allows website visitors to manipulate the data on the agency’s 34 member nations according to their own personal definition of wellbeing. The Better Life index was launched in 2011 to put decisions about the most important aspects of wellbeing into the hands of the public. It’s not an entire free-for-all; the Better Life Index has eleven discrete topics taken from OECD’s other work on wellbeing indicators, split between material living conditions (including housing, income, and jobs), and the more nebulous quality of life (which in this case includes measures of community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work/life balance). Each topic is measured in turn by anywhere from one to four indicators, which run the gamut of statistics from the chance of workers losing their jobs in the last year to self-reported life satisfaction. Wellbeing scores can be broken out by gender, and each user can save his/her personal index and compare it with those of others.

Other examples of wellbeing and quality of life indicator systems include the Mercer Quality of Living Survey and two products from the Economist Intelligence Unit: the Global Liveability Survey and the Where-to-be-Born Index. The last of these, which is based on life satisfaction, is notable for its use of regression analysis to determine the relative weights of the 11 factors that make up the index, in contrast to the equal or user-determined weighting seen elsewhere. The Mercer and Global Liveability surveys rank quality of life in individual cities rather than entire nations; Vienna and Melbourne, respectively, take the top spots.

DESPERATELY SEEKING CULTURE?

These and other wellbeing indicator systems typically break down the general concepts of wellbeing or quality of life into a number of discrete domains like economic prosperity, education, or health. The domains are most often developed by experts working from theoretical conceptions of wellbeing, though a few cases draw heavily from definitions generated by the population being studied. There are a number of variations in the details, but a review of more than 20 indicator systems by a group of researchers led by Michael R. Hagerty identified seven domains that are common across nearly all instances:

• relationships with family and friends
• emotional wellbeing
• material wellbeing
• health
• work and productive activity
• feeling a part of one’s local community
• personal safety

You’ll note the absence of arts and culture from this list. In part, that’s because different societies have dramatically different ideas about what those words mean, and internationally comparable data sources relevant to culture are all but nonexistent. Robert Prescott-Allen, who in 2001 published a book detailing his own indicator system with an emphasis on the environmental impact of countries, originally set out to include culture as a top-level domain. Ultimately, he abandoned the idea, finding he could not identify cultural indicators that were consistent across a majority of nations included in his project.

Prescott-Allen is not alone; most indicator systems and other initiatives rooted in wellbeing have historically overlooked the role of arts and culture, and continue to do so. A recent advocacy campaign to integrate an explicit goal of cultural sustainability into the next iteration of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals appears to have failed, despite support from UNESCO itself and significant investment on the part of that agency in an indicator system to track culture’s role in sustainable development. Despite not achieving its primary objective, the advocacy campaign has yielded a useful set of ways to think about culture’s indirect contribution to wellbeing through priorities such as poverty reduction, education, and good governance.

Even so, a handful of individual countries have developed indices of wellbeing that include culture as a top-level concern. The aforementioned Gross National Happiness index adopted by the government of Bhutan is one example. The “Cultural Diversity and Resilience” domain of the index includes measures such as fluency in one of the regional dialects of Bhutan, expertise in one of thirteen traditional Bhutanese crafts (e.g. weaving, embroidery, blacksmithing, bamboo works, paper making, etc.), and knowledge of DriglamNamzha (the “expected behaviour [of consuming, clothing, moving] especially in formal occasions and in formal spaces”). In North America, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing includes the broad category of culture and leisure, which includes measures of leisure time as well as participation in activities such as camping, sports, or performing arts.

Another notable exception comes from the capability approach, or at least one particular version of it. Although Amartya Sen refuses to endorse “one pre-determined canonical list of capabilities” for the capability approach, his partner in crime, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, has had no such compunctions — and her definition includes multiple nods to arts and culture. [1]

In 2000, Nussbaum published a list of “central human capabilities” as follows:

• Life
• Bodily Health
• Bodily Integrity
• Senses, Imagination, and Thought
• Emotions
• Practical Reason
• Affiliation
  • living with and towards others
  • social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation
• Other Species
• Play
• Control Over One’s Environment
  • Political
  • Material

In her explanation of this list, Nussbaum draws the clearest ties to arts and culture through the two principles of “Senses, Imagination, and Thought” and “Play.” The former includes “being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth,” and the latter refers to “being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.”

“Imagination” by Flickr user Thomas Hawk. Creative Commons license.

PART OF Y/OUR WORLD

Examining the connection between wellbeing and the arts [2] promises to move Createquity’s work forward in two respects. First, it adds some clarity and definition to our rather vague notion of the “concrete and meaningful ways” in which the arts improve people’s lives. And second, it connects the ideas embedded in our healthy arts ecosystem definition to a rich and rapidly expanding body of literature, lending added legitimacy to our work and opening the door to a broader cross-sectoral dialogue. The former of these benefits comes into play whenever we find ourselves having to compare different problems, interventions, or opportunities within the arts ecosystem. Our previous framework of “improving lives in concrete and meaningful ways” was on the right track, but weak in that it left “improving” and “meaningful” undefined. While not completely solving that problem, jumping on the wellbeing bandwagon does allow us to hone in on a range of likely definitions for those terms. Put another way, this new lens clarifies that the conditions and outcomes generated by a healthy arts ecosystem must increase the net wellbeing of society in order to constitute meaningful improvement in people’s lives.

The second benefit is perhaps even more important than the first. Scholars, philanthropists, policymakers, and others have long struggled to articulate how arts and culture fit into a broader conception of public goods and charitable aims, with the result that social innovation initiatives frequently treat the arts by different standards or ignore them entirely. Newer philanthropic movements such as effective altruism have sometimes demonstrated outright hostility to the arts, associating them with headline-grabbing capital or endowment gifts to major universities and large museums. Naturally, that prompts angry and defensive responses from the arts world in turn. Crucially, this distrust and lack of understanding on both sides arises from the absence of a common language with which to judge the value and success of initiatives across sectors. If we can describe the benefits and costs of arts ecosystem outcomes using the language of wellbeing in a way that celebrates rather than subsumes the unique things that make the arts special, that would lay the groundwork for a dialogue about the role of arts and culture in human progress in which all sides have a genuine stake.

Overall, we find the capability approach to be the most effective bridge between our existing healthy ecosystem definition and the fast-growing scholarship on wellbeing. It is particularly worth noting that Martha Nussbaum’s take on the capability approach is the clearest example we’ve found of integrating what have been commonly understood as the “intrinsic” benefits of the arts, such as joy, captivation, etc., into a broader definition of wellbeing. [3] This approach allows us to think of the arts as influencing overall wellbeing both directly, through developing the capabilities of Play and Senses, Imagination, and Thought, and indirectly through, for example, their impact on the capability of Bodily Health. Such a framework improves on the traditional delineation of “intrinsic” and “instrumental” benefits of the arts by proposing a consistent way to value both.

The capability approach is particularly helpful for clarifying what we mean when when we say that human beings today and in the future have “opportunities” to engage in certain types of arts participation. (The same could be said for other efforts in the arts field to “improve access to” things like arts engagement or arts education.) Its emphasis on personal choice and freedoms rather than behaviors suggests that a narrow focus on things like participation rates in an arts class or attendance figures at a concert hall cannot tell us much about wellbeing. Choosing not to engage in a specific arts activity or a long-term aesthetic pursuit can be a well-informed decision that yields greater wellbeing than would otherwise be the case. Likewise, the capability approach reminds us that providing people with access to resources is not enough; they must have the necessary training, skills, and agency to make use of them. This latter insight is consistent with the position that proactive steps should be taken to provide basic arts education opportunities to all, even if not everyone will choose to engage with the arts throughout their whole lives. For all these reasons, although they have not been as widely adopted as the capability approach in general, Nussbaum’s central human capabilities arguably offer a more compelling theoretical rationale for arts and culture’s inclusion in wellbeing than simply slapping arts participation indicators on top of a wellbeing measurement index.

“Which way do we go?” by Flickr user yooperann. Creative Commons license.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

It’s important to remember that as much progress as wellbeing has made since 1948, this is very much a field that is still finding its way. Even the effective altruist community, with its self-assured rhetoric of doing “the most good possible,” is home to raging debates about what exactly that means in practice. So it should come as no surprise that as promising as we feel this direction to be for the arts, we have some thorny questions of our own:

• How does one weigh the benefits of art that is offensive to some people, but empowering to others? This is particularly tricky in cases when art is in direct dialogue — or conflict — with ideologies or belief systems that contribute to individuals’ subjective wellbeing. This push-pull appears particular to the field of arts and culture; it’s difficult to imagine how the health, social integration, or financial stability of one person could detract from that of another (beyond instances in which there aren’t enough resources to go around). In contrast, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a culturally important but challenging artistic work has a negative (if short-lived) impact on the subjective wellbeing of the majority of a population. Yet that work may ultimately have a positive impact on future generations, which leads us to a second question:
• How does one account for changes in the value of arts and cultural products and experiences over time? This dilemma can play out both at the individual level, where cultural experiences that are not immediately pleasurable could nevertheless prove meaningful to the recipient later on; and at a societal level, where future generations may enjoy, appreciate, and/or use today’s cultural products in a very different way than their ancestors do. The latter situation is particularly vexing because there’s no defined time horizon for our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, and thus a huge range of possibilities for how many people might be affected positively or negatively in the future by events taking place and decisions made in the present. Fortunately, that particular puzzle is mirrored in domains outside of the arts, and techniques such as discount rates have been established to deal with the issue, imperfect though they may be.
• How should different elements of wellbeing be weighed against each other? In theory, the only way to answer our opening question of which problems and interventions should receive top priority is to have a clear sense of how the holistic notion of wellbeing relates to its component parts. Yet the actual wellbeing indicator systems that have been put into practice largely seem to avoid this challenge, either declining to offer an overall wellbeing score entirely or weighing each component of the index equally — which, as many have pointed out, comes with its own set of problems. More interesting and intellectually defensible ways of determining weights exist, including expert judgments, crowdsourcing the personal opinions of members of the population under study, and statistical methods such as principal component analysis, two-stage factor analysis, or conjoint analysis. We aren’t in a position at this point to recommend a specific weighting scheme, but it seems like an important area for someone to explore going forward.

For all our never-ending debates about how and whether to measure the impact of the arts, our field may be well poised to contribute to this complex but fascinating dialogue that spans so many disciplines and decades. After all, if anyone is accustomed to making value judgments within an environment that resists quantification, it’s us! Committing to that conversation could open new doors as we contribute to a broader, shared understanding of human progress without having to downplay some of the arts’ more unique, intrinsic contributions. Entering those doors, however, will require leaving the arts cheerleading that many of us are accustomed to at the coat check. It will require contemplating what it looks like to offer the freedom to participate in arts and culture while simultaneously honoring those who decline the invitation.

Encounters between the arts and the capability approach have been both more recent and rare. The two examples we know of are Samuel Jones’s 2010 monograph Culture Shock for the British think tank Demos, which draws on the capability approach to reframe public policy goals relating to culture in England; and a more quantitative application of the capability approach to the arts undertaken by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert of the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project. Stern and Seifert used a modified version of the capability approach as defined in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission as a starting point for their investigation of cultural activity and social wellbeing in Philadelphia and other cities. Their analysis reveals some interesting–if not entirely conclusive–patterns of wellbeing and cultural participation in different parts of Philadelphia. They identify areas of concentrated disadvantage in multiple categories of wellbeing which coincide with racial and socioeconomic divides, and point to an increasing correlation over time between neighborhood economic prosperity and cultural access. Nevertheless, Stern and Seifert leave some of the most exciting theoretical implications of the capability approach for the arts unexplored. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, their analysis routinely measures the relationship between cultural activity and wellbeing as if they were separate concepts. This is partly explained by Stern and Seifert’s adaptation of the wellbeing domains from the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, which do not include culture explicitly. By contrast, at Createquity we feel that there is greater potential to be drawn from Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities for reasons discussed in the main article.

[3] In our original definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, we had been drawn to the concept of as popularized by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his famous Hierarchy of Needs to serve this purpose. Our subsequent research, however, leads us to believe that while self-actualization still enjoys currency in American popular culture (particularly in the business world), in the social sciences it is seen as an increasingly dated and culturally-specific concept. Nussbaum’s central human capabilities may eventually fall prey to similar criticisms, but overall they seem to be a clear improvement over the framework initially proposed in our healthy arts ecosystem definition and a step towards both internal clarity and interoperability with other social innovation initiatives.

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“Maslow’s Real Hierarchy” by Mike Kline

Note: Createquity’s original definition of a healthy arts ecosystem included references to self-actualization as one of the benefits of the arts. We weren’t sure about how self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs were viewed in the research field, however, so we conducted a bit of due diligence to come to a stronger understanding. This work eventually led us to a large body of research on wellbeing, about which we published a feature article in August 2015.

These initial research reports were completed in 2014 by members of the Createquity editorial team. They are intended to give a sense of our (very) preliminary thoughts on the topic in question. We welcome discussion and debate. – IDM

A bit about our process

Rather than generating specific hypotheses regarding the relationship between self-actualization and the arts, we did a scan of existing literature on self-actualization, wellbeing, and identity to get a rough sense of possible answers to the following questions:

• How seriously do psychologists and social theorists take self-actualization today?
• If it does have currency today, does self-actualization have a generally accepted scientific meaning and if so, what is that meaning?
• What is the relationship between self-actualization and more “basic” needs? Is it possible to reach self-actualization without other needs having been met first?

After doing a preliminary “data dump” into Zotero, compiling articles and reports on Maslow’s theory of self-actualization and alternate theories, we paused to determine the best way to move forward. Falling down the rabbit hole of “Was Maslow right or not?” was tempting, but we decided to expand beyond self-actualization specifically while refocusing our energies in two broad areas: examining literature related to the arts and psychological wellbeing, and literature related to the arts and identity. We also each read a handful of articles that emerged during our initial scan and seemed to be particularly relevant.

Extent to which existing research addresses our research questions, and extent to which there seem to be areas of consensus and debate

We found a lot of literature on Maslow’s theory of self-actualization and its application to a range of disciplines (i.e. management theory, mental health). As noted above, whether or not Maslow was “correct” is still hotly contested. Wahba and Bridwell’s literature review of research on Maslow concludes that his theory has been generally disproven. That review, however, focused on research inside the workplace. Another seminal report, Tay and Diener’s “Needs and Subjective Well Being Around the World,” found there are specific categories of need that are consistent across cultures, and there is some suggestion of a needs “hierarchy” that is more fluid than Maslow suggested. They did not explicitly mention self-actualization in their survey, choosing instead of examine individuals’ feelings of mastery/pride in work, self-direction, and autonomy. However, in speaking about the study, one of its authors did refer to self-actualization, noting, “An important departure from Maslow’s theory is that we found that a person can report having good social relationships and self-actualization even if their basic needs and safety needs are not completely fulfilled.”

In short,  while the term continues to be bandied about with some regularity, there does not appear to be one agreed-upon definition of self-actualization and there is a lack of empirical support for Maslow’s hierarchy. In popular literature, Maslow’s pyramid is referred to “quaint and old-fashioned and badly in need of updating.” There is also another, more philosophical critique of the self-actualization idea that questions Maslow’s assumption of there being a stable Self that merely needs to be “actualized.” We didn’t find studies that directly take Maslow to task for this (and we may be  exaggerating his essentialism as we haven’t read his work ourselves), but it seems inherent in the way that postmodern theorists and identity studies scholars talk about identity formation.  From our vantage points as neophytes in psychological research, however, it appears that the concept of self-actualization has been folded into broader discussions of psychic wellbeing, and may be the cornerstone of the burgeoning field of “positive psychology,” which studies the conditions that make people happy as opposed to the conditions/symptoms of psychological distress.

Lacking an agreed-upon definition of what self-actualization is and how it can be achieved, we had difficulty moving forward on the majority of our other research questions. However, we did find a few tidbits here and there.  A rough summary of  questions and relevant notes follows:

• What is the relationship between self-actualization and overall life satisfaction? Have there been any studies looking at both?
  • A 2004 study by Vitterso argues that self-actualization and subjective wellbeing are two separate things. The author cites a lot of literature in outlining the two concepts. Interestingly, Vitterso doesn’t cite Maslow on self-actualization and indeed we’re not sure how closely Vitterso’s use of the term resonates with Maslow (Vitterso certainly isn’t interested in the hierarchy of needs). For Vitterso, SWB is a form of happiness that is related to “being” while self-actualization is related to “doing.” Without reading up on the literature that Vitterso cites, we can’t tell how/if “self-actualization” differs from a more general sense of “personal development.” Vitterso’s use of the term certainly seems to imply that its the process of self-actualization that is important (i.e. that makes people happy) rather than being self-actualized.  Vitterso concludes that “that traditional measurements of SWB are insensitive to important aspects of human lives, and that the concept misses important aspects of psychological well-being.”
  • Tay and Diener’s international survey of subjective wellbeing doesn’t mention self-actualization at all, but instead uses terms of self-direction and autonomy.

• What is the relationship between self-actualization and more “basic” needs? Is it possible to reach self-actualization without other needs having been met first?
  • From article on “Renovating the pyramid of needs”: The researchers state in the article that while self-actualization is interesting and important, it isn’t an evolutionarily fundamental need. Instead, many of the activities that Maslow labeled as self-actualizing (artistic creativity, for example) reflect more biologically basic drives to gain status, which in turn serves the goal of attracting mates.
  • Tay and Diener found that while there is some evidence of a consistent hierarchy across countries, it is indeed possible to fulfill “higher” needs first — i.e. to report strong social relationships and feelings of love and belonging without necessarily having all basic needs secured.

• How do scholars who specialize in self-actualization see the arts fitting in? What are examples of other pathways to self-actualization that don’t involve the arts
  • There doesn’t seem to be much research that addresses this specifically. (We found a few articles that purport to look at the relationship between a specific art form and self-actualization, but they did not not appear to be robust studies.) The closest parallel might be Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” which is frequently brought up in discussion of creativity and education. Flow is not specific to the arts, however; it can be achieved through any individual activity provided that activity triggers the right combination of passion and challenge in a given person.

• Do we have any idea how many people are self-actualized, whatever that means? How would one go about estimating this?
  • If the initial scan of the Vitterso study is correct, self-actualization doesn’t refer to a state which some people have reached and others haven’t, it refers to the a person’s relationship to a particular task/experience. Vitterso cites the theory of “flow” experiences which roughly states that people are most happy when they are challenged but able to fulfill the task.

Where do we go from here?

Unless we want to come up with our own definition of the term, self-actualization may be a dead end. However, further investigation of how psychologists and other researchers characterize subjective wellbeing, and the relationship between SWB and autonomy and creativity may be warranted. It may also be worth looking into how SWB manifests across communities, not just individuals — one critique of Maslow’s pyramid is that it is oriented to an individual’s experience at the expense of collective experience. Arts engagement cultivates both, and Tay and Diener’s work touches on how the attributes of a specific country or community can influence the likelihood of individuals reporting higher SWB.