HEartS
Health, Economic, and Social impact of the ARTs
The HEartS project has generated new knowledge of the impact of the arts and culture on health and wellbeing, from individual, social, and economic perspectives.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the role of the arts and culture on shaping health and wellbeing, both at individual and collective levels. Traditionally, studies have measured the impact of arts interventions on specific patient groups over limited time periods. However, for many people, engagement with the arts is not restricted to measured environments but is instead part of their everyday lives.
The HEartS project has analysed existing public health datasets to facilitate understanding of the relationships between culture and individual, social, and economic facets of health and wellbeing. Recognising the limited data available, we also created large-scale surveys to generate new research datasets and conducted ambitiously scaled qualitative research exploring the effects of cultural engagement on mental health and wellbeing.
HEartS research includes the first large-scale, longitudinal, nationally representative study with multiple waves of follow-up investigating loneliness within older adults; the first study to explore where the barriers leading to differential patterns of arts engagement lie; and the first meta-ethnography to scrutinise the processes through which participatory music engagement supports mental wellbeing. We have also designed and launched a large-scale public health survey exploring the impacts of COVID-19 on arts engagement.
Project team
Aaron Williamon, RCM (PI)
Daisy Fancourt, UCL
Kate Gee, RCM
Adele Mason-Bertrand, RCM
Marissa Miraldo, Imperial
Rosie Perkins, RCM
Robert Perneczky, Imperial
Caitlin Shaughnessy, RCM
Neta Spiro, RCM
Urszula Tymoszuk, RCM
Supported by
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Perkins R, Kaye SL, Zammit BB, Mason-Bertrand A, Spiro N, and Williamon A (2022), How arts engagement supported social connectedness during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK: findings from the HEartS Survey, Public Health, 207, 1-6. DOI»
Perkins R, Mason-Bertrand A, Fancourt D, Baxter L, and Williamon A (2020), How participatory music engagement supports mental wellbeing: a meta-ethnography, Qualitative Health Research, 30, 1924-1940. DOI»
Perkins R, Mason-Bertrand A, Tymoszuk U, Spiro N, Gee K, and Williamon A (2021), Arts engagement supports social connectedness in adulthood: findings from the HEartS Survey, BMC Public Health, 21 (1208), 1-15. DOI»
Shaikh M, Tymoszuk U, Williamon A, and Miraldo M (2021), Socio-economic inequalities in arts engagement and depression among older adults in the United Kingdom: evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, Public Health, 198, 307-314. DOI»
Tymoszuk U, Perkins R, Fancourt D, and Williamon A (2020), Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between receptive arts engagement and loneliness among older adults, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 55, 891-900. DOI»
Tymoszuk U, Perkins R, Spiro N, Williamon A, and Fancourt D (2020), Longitudinal associations between short-term, repeated, and sustained arts engagement and well-being outcomes in older adults, Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 75, 1609-1619. DOI»
Tymoszuk U, Spiro N, Perkins R, Mason-Bertrand A, Gee K, and Williamon A (2021), Arts engagement trends in the United Kingdom and their mental and social wellbeing implications: HEartS Survey, PLOS One, 16 (e0246078), 1-35. DOI»