Research

New research by Arts Council England has revealed the financial challenges facing the museums sector and recommended that museums “must be on the front foot and take responsibility for seeking to link the museum to the broader council agenda” including health and wellbeing.

Beyond health and well-being: transformation, memory and the virtual in older people’s music and dance is a new paper in the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life which evaluates the impact of arts participation on generating and animating memory in participants.

The paper by Kate Wakeling and Jonathan Clark of Trinity Laban puts forward a new way of thinking about the impact of participation that by-passes medical or social impacts.

http://www.ep.liu.se/ej/ijal/2015/15-262/ijal15-262.pdf

Two papers have been published recently exploring the health impacts of singing on individuals and communities.

http://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/resources/research/contribution-community-singing-groups-well-being-older-people-participant-perspec

New figures show that between 1990 and 2013, life expectancy in England increased by 5.4 years: one of the biggest increases in the developed world. However, improvements in life expectancy haven’t been matched by improvements in levels of ill-health, so more people are living longer but spending more years in ill-health.

A new National Endowment for the Arts report – How Creativity Works in the Brain – has called for a large-scale, multidisciplinary study into the nature of creativity, integrating the insights of neurobiologists, psychologists, artists, and educators.

The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is set to partner with UNESCO to conduct a study on the role of culture in the sustainable development of cities in 11 countries of the former Soviet Union.

An increase in the number of young people taking part in film and video activities – from making videos to trips to the cinema – is masking a drop in engagement in the arts, particularly dance, in official government statistics. Arts Council England has pointed to challenges faced by schools and the slipping value of the arts in the curriculum.

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The Office for National Statistics has released a set of data comparing wellbeing levels in the UK with other countries. The data examines health, cultural participation and wellbeing and shows that while Britain is financially better off than before the economic downturn of 2008, overall life satisfaction has decreased.

The Campaign to End Loneliness has developed a new tool to enable organisations to measure the impact of their services on loneliness. The tool is available along with guidance and support for organisations whose work is aimed at supporting older people.

Loneliness is linked to risk of an earlier death, depression and dementia and it is hoped that by using the tool, those working in this field will contribute to a stronger evidence base of what works in tackling and alleviating loneliness.

CultureCase, the web-based resource designed to make accessible academic research into the outputs of the arts, is celebrating its first birthday.

Over the course of the past year, the website has added many short summaries of key research findings on arts outcomes in health and wellbeing.

w: CultureCase