Creativity and wellbeing

A scoping review, on behalf of University of the Arts London, to better understand the pathways that link creativity to personal wellbeing.

The project will help enable evidence-informed decision making for positive social change. 

What did we do?

Together with University of the Arts: London and Brunel University, we conducted a rapid scoping review from September 2023 to January 2024 to answer the following questions: 

1. What are the effects of creativity and creative participation on personal wellbeing?
2. What are the relationships between creativity, creative participation and personal wellbeing?
3. What are the contexts and mechanisms that lead to the effects of and relationships between creativity and creative participation on personal wellbeing?

Background

The project builds on the Centre’s extensive work summarising the existing research on the wellbeing benefits of creative activities, such as participatory arts, and volunteering-based programmes. 

While we have a good sense of the overall state of the evidence and its quality in relation to creative arts, it is not in a form to be easily used by practitioners and policymakers.

Findings from this review highlight the value of creativity across different contexts, and its role as a pathway to improved wellbeing outcomes.

What do we mean by ‘creativity’?
For this review we are using Arts Council England’s definition: ‘Creativity’ describes the process through which people apply their knowledge, skill and intuition to imagine, conceive, express or make something that wasn’t there before.

What do we mean by personal wellbeing?
We’re interested individual-level wellbeing outcomes that relate to subjective wellbeing and psychological wellbeing domains. These include: life satisfaction, happiness, sense of purpose, reduction in anxiety/stress and other measures of feelings, mood or emotions and esteem, confidence, belonging and loneliness.

What have we found?

We have used evidence from the scoping review to  highlight effective approaches and interventions and have developed an evidence-based model to illustrate the pathways that link creativity and wellbeing.

Policy-makers, research funders, and practitioners can use these resources to fund, design and deliver impactful creativity research and interventions. 

Explore the project outputs below.