Answer:
❚❚ There is the challenge of inequality of access to arts
and culture. While acknowledging the very important
ways that social inequalities limit access, the report also
notes that much debate about inequalities is built upon
a narrow definition of arts and culture, seeing it through
hierarchies of taste or public funding and operating with
what has been called a ‘deficit model’. The report widens
the definition to include more informal participation,
commercial and amateur activities. Black, Asian and
minority ethnic cultural practice and consumption have
been particularly marginalised when discussing cultural value
and participation.
❚❚ This is bound up with the question of modes of
engagement, and the report stresses that engagement
takes place in a variety of settings that include purpose-built
cultural buildings, small-scale adapted spaces, institutions
such as care institutions and prisons, and most commonly
the home and the virtual space of the internet. Indeed, the
home is where most engagement with cultural activities
takes place and yet it is virtually ignored in discussions about
their impact.
❚❚ The conversation also requires far more consideration
of the growth of digital technologies, which not only
provide new ways for people to connect with cultural
institutions but also new ways to experience commercial
culture, for example through downloading and streaming
music and film. The distinction between producer and
consumer has also become much less clear with the rise of
co-production and user-generated content.
A fundamental theme underpinning all discussions about
the value of engagement with arts and culture is what we
know, what we don’t know and the sources of our knowledge.
The challenge of methodologies and evidence is a major
focus of the report, running through all the substantive
discussions as well as being the subject of a major dedicated
chapter. Identifying what happens in cultural experiences is
not an easy task. The Cultural Value Project has played an
important role in advancing thinking about how to capture as
well as understand cultural value, but methodologies are not
applicable abstractions to be followed like a recipe, and this
report does not seek to offer a toolkit for cultural value.
❚❚ Funders are currently seen as the principal drivers of
evaluation: the report calls for the wider application of
evaluation as a tool within the cultural sector itself,
rather than as something carried out just for accountability
purposes. Formative and participatory evaluation, as
opposed to summative evaluation at the end, needs
more attention if it is to play a role in helping cultural
organisations and practitioners learn from their activities
and their audiences.
❚❚ The report questions the hierarchy of evidence that sees
experimental methods and randomised controlled trials
as the gold standard, even in areas where these cannot
effectively be applied due to the difficulty in isolating
variables in complex situations. Qualitative research (with
the depth that it gives) need not be less rigorous than
quantitative, experimental studies (with the breadth
that they provide). It does, however, operate with different
criteria of rigour. Qualitative research is far more suited to
certain research purposes, and quantitative research is better
suited to others. The issue is the character of the knowledge
and understanding that is being sought, because each
approach will have its own benefits and drawbacks. The
report shows that they may fruitfully be combined.
❚❚ Rigorous case studies are valid and important evidence
notwithstanding the difficulties of scaling them up.Using
in-depth, case-study evidence is one of the characteristic
strengths of the arts and humanities, and of what they bring
to society’s knowledge and understanding.
❚❚ Too much evaluation of the effects of arts and culture does
not meet the necessary standards of rigour in specification
and research design, especially but not only in the use of
qualitative methods. The high research standards visible
in many of the studies upon which this report draws
needs to become much more the norm across both
research and evaluation.
❚❚ A wide range of methodologies are being used to
research and to evaluate the effects of arts and cultural
engagement and they are explored in the report: social
science research methods, approaches from economics,
the application of ethnography and network analysis, artsbased
and hermeneutic methods, and approaches from
science and medicine.
Explanation:
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