A rapid scoping review of the evidence on creativity and wellbeing, conducted on behalf of the University of the Arts London
Together with University of the Arts: London and Brunel University, we are bringing together the evidence on the links between creativity and personal wellbeing.
Between September 2023 and January 2024, we’ll be conducting a rapid scoping review to answer the following questions:
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 will highlight the value of creativity across different contexts, and its role as a pathway to improved wellbeing outcomes.
We will use evidence from the scoping review to highlight effective approaches and interventions and develop an evidence-based model to illustrate the pathways that link creativity and wellbeing.
Policy-makers, research funders, and practitioners will be able to use these resources to fund, design and deliver impactful creativity research and interventions.
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.
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