Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being

Purpose

Promoting the well-being of all youth today can lead to productive, successful, and healthy adults and the health of society tomorrow. But promoting the well-being of all youth is not simple: It requires a multifaceted set of pathways and strategies that are still being defined in the research literature. In particular, the literature on how arts engagement promotes child and youth well-being remains fragmented across many disciplinary areas and multidisciplinary fields. More-efficient and more-frequent synthesis of the literature is needed to illuminate these pathways and strategies across disciplinary areas and multidisciplinary fields to understand and support youth well-being. Recognizing the critical need to bridge disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields, we aimed to consolidate this dispersed evidence base by

• briefly summarizing the definitions of youth well-being and the dimensions that contribute to it
• examining how youth arts engagement has been defined and measured in the context of well-being
• identifying mechanisms, unique to and common across well-being dimensions and disciplines, by which various art forms facilitate youth well-being and how these mechanisms have been measured.

Key Findings

Research studies have found that arts engagement is an effective way to promote well-being. However, our review found that the literature on arts and youth well-being is not guided by a common framework and thus remains fragmented (approached differently by discipline, theoretical orientation, and level of rigor). Our review identified five complex and interrelated mechanisms that promote well-being through arts engagement and could be a starting point toward a common framework:

• building agency to make positive social change
• facilitating healing and wellness
• encouraging self-expression
• creating social connections and community
• developing skills and a mastery mindset.

These mechanisms were associated with nine well-being dimensions:

• academic and practical competencies
• productivity and employability
• cultural and spiritual beliefs and values
• economic stability
• civic engagement and community safety
• connectedness to others and one's environment
• positive state of mind
• physical health
• feelings of inclusion and justice.

Research specifically discussing the direction or sequence of the relationship between mechanisms and well-being dimensions was limited.

Recommendations

We identified seven gaps in the literature and opportunities to address those gaps to better understand how arts engagement promotes well-being:

Gap 1: Few articles discussed how the mechanisms were related to one another and how using multiple mechanisms amplified (or detracted from) the impact of arts engagement on well-being.

Gap 2: Few articles referenced how the arts build agency to make positive social change to promote well-being.

Gap 3: Few articles referenced interpersonal and community-level mechanisms through which the arts promote well-being.

Gap 4: People we interviewed had limited awareness of how the relationships between mechanisms and well-being vary by the type of art (e.g., reactive participation versus youth-led, different art forms); the literature was also limited in this area.

Gap 5: Few articles described the associations between arts participation and the well-being dimensions of economic stability and feelings of inclusion and justice.

Gap 6: Few articles described the associations between arts engagement, youth well-being, and equity.

Gap 7: Interviewees indicated that existing measures are limited in their ability to quantify the impact of the arts (and specific art practices), differentiate the mechanisms that are intrinsic (e.g., agency) from those that are instrumental (e.g., skills development), and capture impacts from the neurobiological level all the way up to the community level in ways that consider history and context.