What Works for Wellbeing in Culture and Sport: Evidence Programme

The UK What Works Wellbeing Centre was an independent organisation set up to produce robust, relevant and accessible evidence on wellbeing. They worked with individuals, communities, businesses and government, to enable them to use this evidence make decisions and take action to improve wellbeing.

The centre was supported by the ESRC and partners to produce evidence on wellbeing in four areas: work and learning; culture and sport; community; and cross-cutting capabilities in definitions, evaluation, determinants and effects.

They commissioned an initial three-year programme of research synthesis and secondary data analysis across three areas: work and learning, community wellbeing, and culture and sport and continued between 2014-2024

Professor Alan Tomlinson from the University of Brighton joined a collaboration between four UK universities (Brighton, Winchester, Brunel, LSE) seeking to determine wellbeing impacts in culture and sport practices in diverse communities and contexts, and to establish how evidence can be used effectively to inform policy and practice decisions.

A further study from the same core researchers then considered subjective wellbeing outcomes for music and singing in adults.

Prior to the study there had been a growing recognition of the ways in which culture and sport can contribute to wellbeing. A strong evidence base was needed to support innovative service development and the research programme aimed to capture best evidence of wellbeing impacts and outcomes of cultural and sporting activities in order to inform UK policy and practice.

The project sought to work with stakeholders to develop a shared understanding of what works, and what does not work, in culture and sport in order to inform public policy and funding priorities as well as professional practice.

It commenced with a six-month collaborative development phase, which included a two-stage DeLPHi activity involving 57 participants from the UK culture and sport sectors, designed to establish agreed principles and parameters for the three-year culture, sport and wellbeing evidence review programme. The DeLPHi approach offered a way to build consensus through an iterative, structured process that gave all participants an equal voice.

The final articles [linked] an overview of methods and findings from an initial coproduction process with key stakeholders that sought to explore and agree principles and parameters of the evidence review for culture, sport and wellbeing.

The DeLPHi process, in combination with extensive face-to-face deliberation, enabled stakeholders to engage in complex discussion and express nuanced priorities while also allowing a diverse group to come to an overall consensus and agree priorities. 

Researchers demonstrated the importance of consultation to ensure that professionals, practitioners and service users can contribute to evaluation and evidence review. The degree of consensus reached suggested that the resulting statement could inform the development of a broad strategy to assess the effect of policies and initiatives on wellbeing with which all the groups can agree.

The exercise revealed strong support across stakeholders for a common definition of wellbeing on which to base research and evidence, provided that this can encompass dimensions that are important in culture and sport, such as confidence and self-esteem, as well as social dimensions of wellbeing. 

The exercise also revealed strong support for evidence generation, to show wellbeing outcomes of culture and sport, to help to secure funding and therefore contribute to sustainability, to inform programme planning, and to understand the experiences of those who take part in culture and sport. Furthermore, the data showed clear support across stakeholder groups for the use of quality criteria to assess evaluation. 

Stakeholders’ aspirations focus on the importance of context may be revealing a preference for experiential measures of wellbeing in culture and sport. The project explored how people felt while they were engaged in experiences of culture and sport as well as identifying how culture and sport impact on subjective wellbeing overall.

While there is support for quality standards in evidence review, the ambivalence that was revealed surrounding hierarchies of evidence, together with support for forms of evidence typically seen as lower quality, is perhaps a reflection of the relatively early stage of development of evidence generation for wellbeing outcomes in culture and sport.

The process highlighted the dimensions of wellbeing that are important to the sector, as well as the populations, settings and types of intervention that it is important to focus on. Together with the analysis of the qualitative data, it has also helped to establish the topics and the parameters for the evidence reviews. 

In the review of subjective wellbeing outcomes for music and singing in adults, a wide range of activities was reported, most commonly music listening and regular group singing. 

Music has been associated with reduced anxiety in young adults, enhanced mood and purpose in adults and mental wellbeing, quality of life, self-awareness and coping in people with diagnosed health conditions. Music and singing have been shown to be effective in enhancing morale and reducing risk of depression in older people. 

Few studies address subjective wellbeing in people with dementia. While there were a few studies of music with marginalised communities, participants in community choirs tended to be female, white and relatively well educated. 

Research challenges included recruiting participants with baseline wellbeing scores that are low enough to record any significant or noteworthy change following a music or singing intervention. The conclusions of the report were that there was reliable evidence for positive effects of music and singing on wellbeing in adults. However, there remained a need for research with sub-groups who are at greater risk of lower levels of wellbeing, and on the processes by which wellbeing outcomes are, or are not, achieved.

Full results and recommendations can be found on the What Works Wellbeing legacy website.