8.1Returning to the culture – well-being relationship

The arguments of cultural value are curious, yet mundane. Chapters 6 and 7 offered glimpses of how some people argue about the value of culture one way, while others seem to speak a different language entirely. The language of data, metrics and numeric valuations of culture can feel at odds with how the majority of artists and cultural practitioners speak […]

8.2Talking different languages of value

This chapter began its life in a Manchester hotel in 2014. I was preparing a conference presentation called ‘Measuring National Well-being and Cultural Participation—why don’t things quite add up?’ A colleague was passing as I was editing a slide with this equation on it: He asked me what the equation was for. I was a bit taken aback, because I […]

8.3Context: The Happy Museum and Data

The aim is to arm museums with compelling statistics to show how a healthy culture must be at the heart of a healthy society. (Tony Butler, Director Happy Museum Project and Director Museum of East Anglian Life in Fujiwara 2013, 5) The relationship between culture and well-being has been operationalised((In quantitative research, operationalisation refers to the process through which abstract […]

8.3.1Taking Part Survey and the data on culture

‘Museums and Happiness’ includes findings from quantitative research that used data from the Taking Part Survey1. The report explains why TPS data were chosen over other surveys, based on the different variables available, sample size and so on.((If you are interested in more information on the differences across BHPS, TPS and Understanding Society at the time, and why they mattered, […]

8.3.2The well-being data available in the Taking Part Survey

Happiness taps in to people’s emotions, technically their affective state, and hence tries to gauge people’s moods at that moment. (Fujiwara 2013, 12) As we saw in Chap. 6, part of thinking through how humans experience well-being, is acknowledging these processes are cultural and centre ideals of ‘society’; they also involve imagining moments of social or cultural engagement and how […]

8.4Museums and Happiness and other relationships

The research reported in ‘Museums and Happiness’ was actually looking for more than one relationship. The equation I cited earlier in that presentation in the Manchester hotel was one of two presented in the text. The report states: We look at the impact on wellbeing and health of participating in and being audience to the arts and of being involved […]

8.5Following the findings

Even when you follow the processes involved in estimating the relationships in the ‘Museums and Happiness’ research, as they are broken down here, it still might be hard to see how this valuation works—from a common-sense perspective. Following the data did not find data in which people explicitly value visiting museums at about £3200 per year, and yet this is […]

8.6How was the value of the relationship between museums and happiness calculated?

The previous sections have walked you through some of the contexts of the research in ‘Museums and Happiness’: the data, the concepts and the relationships being modelled—as well as an aside about how appealing headline findings are when they are formulated in monetary terms that appear easy to grasp. We have looked at what this example of quantitative research was […]

8.6.1Some reasons why findings may differ

As I mentioned in Sect. 8.2, we began a journey which involved understanding the contexts in which the research in ‘Museums and Happiness’ was undertaken. My colleague also looked at the quantitative work and used the same data, following the methodology section, to try and reproduce the results. The headline finding of the quantitative work in our project is that […]

8.7Conclusion: The value of valuation

Value is, in other words, both various and variable. (Throsby 2001, 28) Where are we with our thinking on the value of valuation? If some people in the sector work in the sector because they know it improves happiness from their own experience, do they need proof that this is true? Even if this validation comes from research that is […]

8.8Bibliography