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This monograph has specific and concrete recommendations to offer those developing such
indicators including:
� a schema for making sense of the various types of data that help portray arts and culture in
communities
� priorities for measurement
� a new nationally comparable set of measures or indicators that help assess important aspects
of a community’s cultural offerings.
Using these measures it also presents rankings of metropolitan statistical areas in the United
States, illustrating how the robustness of cultural offerings and activity can vary from place to place
depending on the measures used. The overarching concept guiding the development of specific
measures is the definition of cultural vitality.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of Cultural Vitality linking the arts and culture to the concepts of
quality of life, good communities and great cities. In bringing to life the cultural vitality concept, the
study considers three dimensions that are appropriate for indicator measurement and key to
tracking important aspects of cultural vitality: presence of opportunities for cultural participation,
cultural participation itself, and support for arts and cultural activities. Key aspects of an expanded
understanding of these three dimensions are discussed in this section.
In the Chapter 2 “Assessing the State of the Community Indicator Field with the Cultural
Vitality Concept” there is a reconnaissance of indicator initiatives affiliated with several prominent
United States-based and international indicator networks. The purpose is to identify any advances
on how current indicator systems define the arts and culture and measure various aspects of
cultural vitality.
Chapter 3 “Signs of Progress in Indicator-like Initiatives: City Rankings and Arts Sector and
Creative Economy Reports” briefly discusses three types of initiatives that resemble indicator
system development in important ways. The first consists of city rankings, which assess
characteristics of place in a comparative context and increasingly include some arts and cultural
measures. The second and third consist of “arts sector” reports and “creative economy” reports.
Chapter 4 “Sorting Data Relevant for Indicators of Cultural Vitality” presents a schema for
distinguishing arts and culture–related data by level of availability (tiers) and other characteristics
that reflect usability:
Level1 “publicly available, recurrent, nationally comparable data” and Level 2 “publicly available,
recurrent, locally generated data” are immediately suitable for development of indicators. Level 3
“quantitative, sporadic, episodic data” provides examples of how data could be collected and
Level 4 “qualitative documentation (often anthropological or ethnographic)” provides rich
contextual information about cultural vitality and informs design of quantitative data collection
efforts.
Chapter 5 “Cultural Vitality Measurement Recommendations” summarises the study’s
priorities for aspects of cultural vitality that should be measured quantitatively. On the basis of
these priorities and the knowledge of nationally comparable, annually recurrent data, it also
presents the initial recommendations for ‘tier one’ indicators of cultural vitality as well as examples
of ‘tier two’ measures that are useful in completing the cultural vitality picture.
Chapter 6 “Rankings from New Tier One Measurements” discusses the nationally comparable
annual indicators of cultural vitality that developed from arange of tier one data sources. This
demonstrates how these measures allow for the comparison of U.S. metropolitan areas with
populations of more than 1 million along some dimensions of cultural vitality. These comparisons
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