Quick Study: 
January 23, 2025

Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study. I'm Josephine Reed. This is the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, where we'll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life. Sunil Iyengar is the pilot of Quick Study and he's the director of research and Analysis here at the Arts Endowment. Good morning, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Hi, Jo.

Jo Reed: Okay, what have you got to start off this new year

Sunil Iyengar: You may have noticed from our years of running a podcast together that whenever we talk about measuring the benefits of the arts for individuals in communities, that is studies and evaluations showing the potential impact of the arts or creative arts therapies. We often talk about the arts in terms of health arts, helping to treat physical or psychological conditions, or another way we talk about the value of the arts a lot of times is we share studies about how the arts contribute to economic growth and innovation measured in terms like GDP.

Jo Reed: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Sunil Iyengar: But last month, Jo, there was a report that came out from the UK from its government department for a culture, media and sport that to my mind fuses these two ways of thinking about how we quantify the arts relationship to larger societal outcomes. The report is called Culture and Heritage Capital, monetizing the impact of Culture and Heritage on Health and Wellbeing, and it was produced in consultation with the firm Frontier Economics.

Jo Reed: Okay, back up a second. Did you say monetizing?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. That's what's so distinctive about the study in general. When we talk about the arts potential effects on health and quality of life, or even when we talk about the role of the arts in helping to mitigate conditions such as pain or mental or neurological disorders, we tend to lack rigorous data on cost savings or cost effectiveness associated with these programs or treatments. Just to be brief, we have plenty of small studies showing how positive relationships between arts participation or creative arts therapies and health and wellbeing works in various population groups, but we don't know about how those potential benefits translate to healthcare cost savings in terms of fewer hospital visits, less reliance on medication or adherence to healthy regimens or lifestyles.

Jo Reed: Well, that makes sense that a country with a national health program would be interested in that. So how does this report go about tying the economic benefits to the health benefits of the arts?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. Well, the UK report does a couple of things. First, it trawls through the research literature reviewing over 3,500 paper abstracts and settling on a full review of roughly 160 papers in their entirety. The researchers were on the lookout for studies that met their standards for showing causal evidence of the arts on health and wellbeing. In reviewing these studies, the researchers broke out such information as the type of arts and cultural engagement, the specific health related outcomes associated with that engagement, the age group of the people who benefited from the engagement and how frequent that arts engagement was.

Jo Reed: Okay. You know the question that's coming, how are we defining arts and cultural engagements?

Sunil Iyengar: That's a good question. The researchers derived their definition of arts participation from existing surveys they found in the literature based on studies of the arts and health. So they boil it down to three categories. One is what they call general cultural and heritage activities. By that they mean engaging with all kinds of different types of arts and cultural activities, whether to attend or create art. Another is called creative or artistic works. That category means engaging with specific art forms, theater, drama, opera, cinema, singing, dancing, and music. Again, either attending or doing those activities. And a third category they deal with is called cultural venues and production facilities, which means visiting museums, galleries, heritage sites, theaters, cinemas, and concerts.

Jo Reed: So that's what you mean by the arts and health study. How did the researchers get at the money aspect of this?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. Well, to arrive at a way of talking about the health benefits of these arts activities in terms of monetary units, the researchers first used a standardized measure to capture all the different positive outcomes shown by the studies they identified. This measure is known as quality or QALY standing for quality adjusted life years. The researchers then took the QALYs and converted them to monetary amounts. The report also looked at monetary amounts associated with higher productivity resulting from improved quality of life, for example, increased wages for workers. Now importantly, the researchers focus on two aspects of health economics related to the arts. One is the estimated benefit per person, and the other is the so-called societal benefit. That is how that cost benefit is distributed across the entire population. So a key research tool that allowed them to make this distinction is a longstanding UK survey of arts participation that gives researchers a sense of how much people in Great Britain engage with the arts over time.

Jo Reed: Drum roll, please. What did the study find?

Sunil Iyengar: So it depends on the type of study, the arts activity or the health outcomes that they focused on in terms of the report, which covered a lot of ground. But in general, the researchers estimated benefits of 68 pounds per year stemming from research about music's effects on self-esteem in children to 1,310 pounds per year for art space museum activities among older people. The study found that, in general, higher frequencies of engagement in arts and culture were associated with the greatest benefits per person. Now, that's for individual level benefits. For society as a whole, the researchers compute 18.5 million per year worth of benefits linked with older adults doing arts-based museum activities. That translates to about or converts to about $22.7 million all the way up to 8 billion pounds per year associated with general arts and cultural engagement by adults say between 30 and 50 years of age. So in terms of US dollars, that's close to 10 billion per year. Overall, the researchers find “the largest society-wide benefits are for models that use broad measures of engagement, such as ‘participation in mental health in adults’ and ‘general engagement and general health in adults’. Since the general measures capture the highest engagement levels.”  They basically mean that the broader the activity, the more people it engaged, generally the better off economically things were.

Jo Reed: Well, that sounds really kind of impressive to me. I take it that what we're discussing are health and wellbeing for people attending arts event or creating art in large numbers. But we've also discussed creative art therapies like visual art therapy, dance therapy, music therapy, and so on. Was there any exploration of the health economics of these activities?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, I'm actually really glad you asked. The researchers perform a limited analysis of the benefits of these therapies. Specifically, they find based on the literature and by applying a “what if” scenario to the number of UK people eligible to receive visual art therapy specifically for cancer treatment, they estimate 730 pounds per year benefit for people diagnosed with breast cancer undergoing art therapy and 450 pounds per year for those diagnosed with other cancers. So the total monetized benefit for visual art therapy alone being used for cancer treatment, they go on to estimate is 4.5 million pounds per year or what would be $5.5 million according to current exchange rates. Now, to us at the NEA, we are running the Creative Forces Initiative. As you know, Jo, we've talked about it a few times with the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. That little nugget could be of particular interest as we're currently on our own looking to understand how best to study the health economic outcomes from our integration of creative arts therapies in military health treatment facilities or veteran hospitals. So we've just begun that work with researchers from Johns Hopkins University, and I look forward to reporting. I hope, some promising strategies that we may unearth with them,

Jo Reed: And I look forward to hearing them. Sunil, thank you. 

Sunil Iyengar: Thank you, Jo.

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar. He's the Director of Research and Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts. You've been listening to Quick Study. The music is We Are One from Scott Holmes Music. It's licensed through Creative Commons. Until next month, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. 

In this episode of Quick Study, we discuss findings from a UK study about the economic consequences of using arts-based strategies to improve health and well-being.