Introduction
Our ENACT project (Enhancing children and young people’s arts and cultural engagement) aims to explore the different factors that influence young people’s engagement in arts and cultural activities, including the barriers that prevent engagement and the enablers that encourage it.
We established this project because our research has demonstrated that the arts can help prevent mental health problems, manage mental health symptoms, and support wellbeing for young people. But we also know that there are inequalities in arts engagement, so people who are younger, male, from ethnic minorities, and living in less wealthy areas often find it harder to access these activities. ENACT aims to go beyond these ingrained and hard to change predictors to identify factors that we might be able to modify to help young people engage in the arts.
We are currently working with young people and leaders of arts organisations to create a new questionnaire that assesses factors relating to arts and cultural engagement. Supported by funding from UCL Grand Challenges, we recently facilitated two workshops. These involved young people who do and do not engage in the arts, as well as advisors from arts organisations. Having a diverse range of perspectives in these workshops was vital, so that the developed questionnaire can be used nationally.
The workshops
We hosted two workshops in June 2024. Both workshops followed a similar structure, with introductions, a presentation, and three activities. Following introductions, Wardah started the workshop with a presentation on the study background and gave a brief overview of the behaviour change model being used to develop the questionnaire.
Wardah then led the first activity. Workshop attendees were asked to draw a young person in their community and reflect on which arts and cultural activities were available to that young person in the real world, versus what would be available to them in an ideal world. This activity helped us to understand what people perceive as arts and cultural activities, as well as what is currently available in their communities.
“It was a really interesting session and has sparked some questions around our own programmes with young people and evaluation.”
– Arts organisation leader
Jess (joint lead of ENACT) led the next activity, in which workshop attendees discussed their drawings in smaller groups. We all reflected on what might prevent activities that would be available in an ideal world from being present in the real world.
We thought about the differences between the kinds of arts and cultural activities included in these drawings compared to those measured in previous surveys of young people’s arts and cultural engagement. Discussions touched on how outdated the activities in existing questionnaires are, and how questions are often framed as blaming the individuals for not engaging in arts and culture.
We also had really interesting conversations about the provision of activities online versus in person. Some young people said that they thought online opportunities were useful for increasing access, but they should never replace in person activities, as they can’t always provide the same benefits.
“I was so interested to hear [young people’s] responses regarding digital spaces. The museum/heritage sector is often investing in digital to engage younger people when perhaps their strength is in the actual 3D space and physicality they can provide. Interesting!”
– Workshop participant
The final activity was facilitated by Dr Karen Mak (joint lead of ENACT). First, she delivered a detailed presentation on the behaviour change model. This is the COM-B model, which proposes that people’s behaviour (B) is a result of their physical and psychological capabilities (C), social and physical opportunities (O), and automatic and reflective motivations (M).
In the first workshop, we then categorised the enablers and barriers of arts and cultural engagement into the different elements of COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation). The second workshop subsequently built on this – participants identified the most common enablers and barriers and worked in small groups to come up with questions to measure these capabilities, opportunities, and motivations. For example, the cost of activities was an important barrier, repeatedly described as preventing young people from engaging in arts and culture. We therefore discussed different ways we could ask young people about this potential barrier.
“[Being part of the workshops] provided insight into the complexity of identifying whether something is a barrier or enabler. For example, the use of social media platforms such as TikTok can be considered as both. Personally, I thought this was an enabler but through engaging in discussions and hearing from others it can be classed as both. This made me reflect on the importance of being open minded when engaging in research.
I also found it interesting to hear how people define the terms ‘arts and culture’. Hearing about the different activities classed as arts and culture was intriguing as I had alternative suggestions that stemmed from my cultural norms. This reinforced the importance of having a range of perceptive when engaging in national and international projects!”
– Wardah, Research Intern
Next steps: Get involved!
Our next steps are to review everything we discussed in the workshops and finish developing a full set of questions for the new questionnaire. We will be staying in touch with everyone involved in the workshops, as they will then review our proposed questions.
Long-term, our aim is to publish a comprehensive validated questionnaire that other researchers can use. We then hope to use this questionnaire to explore the enablers and barriers of arts and cultural engagement in 10,000 young people across the UK. In doing so, we hope to improve the quality of research on this topic, so that we can inform meaningful action to address inequalities in access to arts and culture for young people.
However, before we can do this, we need to try the questionnaire out with a group of around 65 young people. We will be recruiting participants in September 2024, so if you’re aged 16-25 and are interested in taking part, please sign up to our newsletter or follow us on X and LinkedIn to receive updates.
