Subjective well-being and engagement in arts, culture and sport

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between engagement in arts, culture and sport, and subjective well-being, contributing to our understanding of the leisure experience, and cultural value, of these activities. Ordered probit analysis of UK data from wave 2 (2010-2011) of Understanding Society provides evidence in support of a wide range of cultural goods generating positive leisure experience, reflected in overall (life, general happiness) and domain (leisure) satisfaction. Frequency of engagement is central to certain activities: only regular participation in arts activities and sport generates positive effects. In contrast, arts events are positive irrespective of frequency. The findings also indicate even less frequent engagement in activities exhibiting cultural characteristics, e.g. museums/historical sites, has positive association with satisfaction. Finally, although employment has a negative association with leisure satisfaction, engagement in leisure activities is not found to spillover into job satisfaction (with the exception of certain sports). This suggests individuals consider work and leisure (including quality of leisure time) separately.

Do the arts make you happy? A quantile regression approach

“…Hence for sports and exercise, the effect is likely to be (partially) mediated via the effect on health. Wheatley and Bickerton (2017) also found evidence that both moderate and mild intensity sport were associated with satisfaction with life; however, they only had an effect on happiness at higher frequencies of engagement (three times a week or more).…”

“…This paper addresses the effect of attendance at arts events on reported happiness, building on previous studies by inter alia Michalos (2005), Ateca-Amestoy et al (2008), Michalos and Kahkle (2010) and Wheatley and Bickerton (2017). The key contribution of the paper though is to re-investigate relationship between arts and happiness using quantile regression.…”

“…More recently, Wheatley and Bickerton (2017) investigated the relationship between engaging in arts and sports and four well-being measures: happiness, satisfaction with life, satisfaction with the amount of leisure and job satisfaction. In particular, they found that higher frequency of attendance at arts events was associated with greater happiness; the 'at least once a week' and 'limited weekly but at least monthly' dummy variables had significant coefficients.…”

“…The decision in part rests on whether happiness is viewed as a cardinal or an ordinal variable, but is also influenced by the nature of the measurement scale used capture happiness. For example, the UK Understanding Society survey used by Wheatley and Bickerton (2017) measures happiness on a four-point scale, whilst the UK Taking Part survey employs a 10-point scale. Studies which report both types of regression tend to show few differences in the relationships identified (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters 2004;Powdthavee 2015).…”

Subjective well-being in cultural advocacy: a politics of research between the market and the academy

“…Indeed, academics have little reason to interrogate such results either; the citations received by this report largely consist of using it as an exemplar of secondary analysis for estimating social return on investment (Leck, Upton and Evans 2014); where the response is more critical, this is due to general issues with deriving monetary SWB estimates (Wheatley and Bickerton 2017). The lack of critical interrogation of reports such as these from the academic community is not limited to issues around modelling, however.…”