aceUVi

Outline of the report
This literature review focuses on individuals’ engagement with arts and culture,
though later sections recognise that organisations often broker these interactions.
The focus on individuals has proven to be a convenient means of narrowing the
scope of our review, while allowing us to address (and hopefully clarify) several
issues that emerge at the point at which research on the immediate experience of
culture intersects with discussions of impacts and value. In choosing to explore
the ways in which arts and cultural experiences affect people on a personal level,
we by no means mean to dismiss the considerable benefits that arise from lively
cultural activity for the greater society, nor do we believe that these two aspects
can be neatly separated. In fact, the individual and social levels are integrally
connected.
The first section of the review examines concepts of ‘cultural value’ and goes on
to consider various different frameworks and languages that have been used to
discuss the values and impacts that derive from cultural experiences. Authors
approach the topic from several different disciplinary perspectives without necessarily
positioning their work in relation to the contributions from other fields.
One of the challenges we have faced in this literature review has been determining
when authors are essentially writing about the same thing, just with different sets
of vocabulary, and when important distinctions are being made that should not be
glossed over. We conclude this section with a summative review of the terminology
that has been advanced in the literature and introduce the term ‘individual
impacts’ to discuss the breadth of phenomena that we address in this report.
The second section examines various different ways in which researchers have
measured, interrogated or assessed individuals’ responses to arts and culture. We
structure our discussion around groups of studies that employ similar methodologies.
By viewing this diverse body of research together, we find that a picture
begins to emerge of how the experience of arts and culture affects people over
time.
While we maintain our focus on individual impacts throughout, the third section
of this review addresses this issue from an organisational perspective: what do
organisations that engage people in impactful experiences look like How can we
assess the quality of cultural organisations as a whole
Finally, a brief coda presents some current initiatives that integrate assessments
from multiple sources (self-assessments, peer review and audience feedback) in
the evaluation of cultural works.
Introduction 29
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences