Helping Parkinson’s sufferers through ballet

This research was conducted by Sara Houston and Ashley McGill at the University of Roehampton, UK
Summary
This paper reports the results of a 12 week programme for people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease run by English National Ballet. The researchers observed how people responded to the sessions, conducting tests for balance, stability, posture, and discovering more about their general mood and wellbeing. They found improvements in balance and stability (though not posture) as a result of
By | 16 April 2014 |

Insights into arts and culture (Research category)

This section contains research that generates ‘insights’ to inform work
in arts and culture settings. The summaries in this section are designed to
help inform the decisions arts and cultural organisations have to make,
whether that’s developing a new marketing campaign, a new programme of work
or making strategic plans for the future.
This section is divided into the following categories:
consumer behaviour
fundraising
developing new audiences
live and digital
engagement
models
of community engagement
organisational change
partnerships and
collaboration

The reasons musicians favour free streaming services

This research was conducted by Ramadan Aly‐Tovar, Maya Bacache‐Beauvallet, Marc Bourreau, and Francois Moreau at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Institut Polytechnique de Paris, FranceSummaryThis paper uses survey data from 1100 French professional musicians to draw out four main reasons why they favour free streaming. Firstly, it is a ‘discovery tool that helps consumers to explore the music catalogue’ of less well-known artists. Secondly, it is a way to drive ticket sales for live

Using Shakespeare to exert soft power and online cultural diplomacy

anniversary of his death in 2016More than 140 countries took part in the 3,500 events alongside a programme of online collaborations. A social media campaign by the British Council multilingual teams generated a potential audience for the #ShakespeareLives hashtag of ‘2,725,435,930, including 1,957,400,000 via Twitter, 421,183,800 via Facebook and 300,754,200 via Instagram and other social media platforms’. The research is based on a sample of more than 10,000 posts which used the hashtag around the

Cultivating theatre audiences through online activity

attenders and possibly address the challenge presented by an aging audience for the traditional arts.
The research is based on the results of an audience survey conducted at Piccolo Teatro in Milan (the largest repertory theatre in Italy)
The research tested a range of hypotheses: that those in the tech-savvy segment were more likely to be younger, male, live outside the host city of a venue (because the web does not respect geographical distance), be a cultural omnivore (or ‘all-rounder’ as they
By | 26 April 2014 |

Prolonged arts education reduces stress in children from low-income households

some of these stress effects for children growing up in poverty. They found that specialist arts education promoted the children’s emotional self-regulation, thereby reducing the chronic stress effects of poverty.
Physiological stress decreased after arts classes but not standard classroom sessions
This study followed more than 300 four year-olds attending a specialised Head Start preschool programme in Philadelphia that incorporated an arts enrichment programme. The children attended music
By | 19 February 2018 |

Using an 'Index of Access' to measure the geographic inquality of cultural amenities

close it was by foot, bicycle, car or public transport, and the level of private car ownership in the area. The research was not concerned with the programming or audiences for these organisations.The Index of Access also tended to correlate with other measures of privilege or exclusionThe neighbourhoods which fell into the ‘highest access zones’ for Detroit’s arts and culture organisations had ‘fewer ethnic minorities, fewer people with less than a Bachelor’s degree, and higher household income’. The Index revealed that, in general, libraries were ‘more accessible as compared to the other sub-fields’ like visual arts organisations.

Playing a musical instrument increases educational attainment

the sorts of other non-music related hobbies the child partakes in also make a difference to educational outcomes.
The causal mechanisms remain a mystery
The author is confident about the causal relationship between music playing and educational attainment, however they suggest more research is needed to unpick exactly how this operates and which mechanisms can be supported to best exploit it.
By | 2 March 2016 |

How do you select research for inclusion in CultureCase? (Question and answer)

In absolute terms, we only include research that is published in peer reviewed academic journals. This is for two reasons: it is a primary source of high-quality research that is frequently theoretically grounded and methodologically sophisticated – and hence has enormous potential value to decision-makers and advocates in the cultural sector; secondly, it tends not to feature in the advocacy material of the cultural sector and even less in the decision-making process of practitioners.
We use
By | 3 December 2013 |

Social interaction in a gallery shapes our reception to art

This research was conducted by Dirk vom Lehn at King's College London, UKSummaryThis paper is primarily about the potential of audio-visual recording as a tool to understand the reactions that people have when encountering art in a museum. But there are useful findings that can help inform our understanding of the impact of art and how that impact occurs. The research found that the moment of interaction with an artwork in a gallery is a social one. In addition to collecting video
By | 10 April 2014 |