We Know What You Did Last Summer
Among minor casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic—at least in my neighborhood— were troops of parents and young children going door to door for Halloween, wearing costumes with masks that were not N95s. In those years, leaving a bucket of candy out on the stoop with a “Have at it!” sign became an enduring option.
Back then, the diminution of trick-or-treaters reflected pandemic-era losses in social connectedness at large. Fortunately, as with other shared cultural experiences, the arts can allow people and communities to rebuild those ties. Studies have shown socialization as a key motive behind many forms of arts participation, just as attending and making art have been linked in the UK with greater feelings of social connectedness or reduced loneliness. Such reports and articles gained topical relevance after the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.”
The arts—and performing arts in particular—have witnessed a slow recovery from the post-pandemic malaise. We know this from various sources: e.g., economic data, research literature, and self-reported rates of arts attendance. So, working with the NEA, the U.S. Census Bureau has included questions on its experimental Household Pulse Survey (HPS) to help policymakers monitor national and state levels of arts participation among many other factors “impacting U.S. households from a social and economic perspective.”
Unlike the NEA’s periodic Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), which asks Americans about their arts participation habits over the past year, the HPS is administered month to month. Today, our office released an analysis of HPS findings from April 2 to July 22, 2024. Self-reported rates of arts attendance in the past month did not vary significantly across the different data-collection periods from April to July. That is, more than a third (33.4 percent) of adults, representing 85.2 million, attended a live music, dance, or theater performance, visited an art exhibit or gallery, or went to see a movie.
The menu of arts activities on the survey, while not comprehensive, permits a baseline measure that can be tracked reliably over time. (See the NEA’s research brief, authored by Patricia Mullaney-Loss, for differences between visual and performing arts attendance, for example, and across demographic subgroups.) Just over 16 percent of adults created, practiced, or performed art over the last month, in every wave of the survey.
The HPS also asked whether respondents agreed with the following statement: “There are plenty of opportunities for me to take part in arts and cultural activities in my neighborhood or community.” Over the period of the survey reported here, 38 percent of adults said they disagreed or “strongly” disagreed with that statement. The number is slightly up from 2017, when the question was last asked in an NEA survey. Arts funders and cultural planners will want to dig deeper into the data to understand the implications by race/ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, and state of residence.
But the study’s kicker (not a technical term) is that Americans who participated in the arts were more likely than non-arts participants to engage with a host of mechanisms for building community and social connections. They were more likely to belong to clubs or organizations, to participate in group meetings, to speak on the phone with family, friends, and neighbors—and to do so more frequently than non-arts participants—and they were often less likely to report feeling lonely in general.
Future analyses will seek to learn whether these positive correlations obtain even after adjusting for age, gender, and race/ethnicity. For now, the finding about arts participation’s social value is a treat with no tricks.
Sunil Iyengar directs the Office of Research & Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts.