Biography
Neta Spiro is Reader in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and an honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London. Neta’s background is in music (BMus, Oxford University), cognitive science (MSc, Edinburgh University), and music psychology (PhD, Amsterdam University). She was previously Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and at the New School for Social Research, New York, and Head of Research at Nordoff Robbins, London. Neta taught at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, where she continues as an honorary member. Two questions underlie her research: What is the potential role of music in peoples’ health and wellbeing, and what is communicated when we make music together? Her research on these questions has been from three perspectives: investigations of people’s reported experiences of music making, effects on people’s judgements, and analysis of interaction in music. Neta’s current research includes the Health, Economic, and Social impact of the ARTs (HEartS) project, which explores the impact of arts and culture on health and wellbeing from individual, social, and economic perspectives. She is investigating the range of relationships that people can have with music and is exploring the possible levels of shared understanding across a variety of forms of music making. Her teaching includes music, health, and wellbeing topics as well as areas of music psychology.
Title:
Arts, health and wellbeing in the United Kingdom: A large-scale survey
Abstract
Evidence on the role of the arts in supporting health and wellbeing has been growing. Projects have ranged in scale from large, ongoing, and often nationally representative cohort studies to small, local, individual case studies. In the large-scale studies, arts engagement has often been characterized by prioritizing “high-brow” art forms while case-studies have included a broader spectrum of arts activities. The larger scale studies have tended to prioritise mental wellbeing with less focus on social outcomes while some smaller studies have explored social outcomes. Where there has been focus on social outcomes, this work has tended to focus on arts engagement in older age.
The multi-disciplinary HEartS project, which ran 2018-2021 and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explored the impact of the arts and culture on health and wellbeing, from individual, social, and economic perspectives. In this presentation, I will focus on one strand of this work in which we developed a new, large-scale, mixed-methods survey which collected data on broadly defined and inclusive arts engagement among adults in the UK. Led by the view that both positive- and ill-health contribute to how we experience our mental and social wellbeing, we included both positive and negative aspects (e.g., social connectedness and loneliness) in the survey. The survey included a new set of questions about arts engagement, validated outcome measures about mental and social wellbeing, as well as open questions about respondents’ perceptions of how arts engagement is linked with feelings of social connectedness. The analysis therefore included quantitative approaches to investigate the patterns of arts engagement, as well as the connections between arts engagement and mental and social wellbeing. It also included a qualitative approach to investigate the extent to which arts engagement is perceived to be linked with feelings of social connectedness, which forms of arts engagement are reported as most connecting, and how.
The findings of the quantitative analysis – concerning 5,338 respondents, suggest that more arts engagement was associated with higher levels of wellbeing, social connectedness, and lower odds of intense social loneliness. However, there was a positive association between more arts engagement, depression, and intense emotional loneliness for the participants who participated in the widest range of arts activities. The findings of the qualitative analysis of 5892 respondents suggest that arts engagement can support social connectedness among adults in the UK through multiple pathways, providing large-scale evidence of the important role that the arts can play in supporting social public health.