Department for Culture Media and Sport

drivers, impacts and value

The CASE programme board commissioned the University of London’s Evidence in Policy and Practice Information (EPPI) Centre and Matrix Knowledge Group in December 2008 to undertake a fundamental review and analysis of available research and data.

The project covered new analysis looking at what drives engagement in culture and sport, marshalling the evidence on the impacts of engagement, and developing and deploying new ways of generating economic values for engagement.

This project is unique and ground-breaking in a number of ways: as a new kind of research collaboration, the first cross-cutting review in this area, the generation of new resources that will add value to future policy and research.

The following reports are offered in PDF format for which you will need a PDF reader. You can download a reader free of charge from the Adobe website.

Reports

This is a high level summary of all the research. The report contains an introductory section from CASE explaining how the range of findings and resources detailed on this page, and in the wider CASE programme, can feed into a variety of national and local policy processes.

Research findings and resources by topic:

Drivers of Engagement

This is a high level mainly non-technical summary report of the analysis of Taking Part and the development and use of the CASE engagement simulation model.

Key messages

A huge range of factors predict and influence decisions to take part in culture and sport. The analysis here presents key background factors that predict engagement. They include:

  • watching TV for more than three hours a week is associated with reduced engagement
  • being of black or minority ethnic background strongly predicts library use
  • higher income is not strongly associated with more arts attendance
  • having a sense of influence over local facilities strongly predicts sports engagement
  • living among heritage predicts heritage engagement

The report also present v.1.0 of a new computer model that simulates patterns of engagement in the population. This model will be accessible via DCMS for those wishing to run scenarios for business cases or policy option appraisal (see below)

A detailed technical description of the analysis covered in the equivalent summary paper. Includes all references and a depth literature review.

These are the appendices of the Drivers technical report giving more detail on the methods and outputs.

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Impact of Engagement

This report covers in-depth reviews of research using quantitative methods on the learning impacts for young people across four sectors: arts participation, sports participation, libraries attendance and museum, galleries and heritage attendance. Research using quantitative methods was specifically chosen in order to aid future analysis to derive economic values.

The systematic reviews also represent a demonstration of what is achievable with the research, as well as highlighting the need for more research to use better designs, allowing for stronger, more persuasive evidence to be generated in the future.

Key messages

Strong consistent effects on learning measures were found for young people engaging in structured sports or arts activities. While there is promising evidence of learning benefits from school libraries, museums and heritage site visits, the evidence was too weak to draw strong conclusions. A key conclusion is that stronger research and evaluation designs are needed to generate more persuasive evidence of the learning impact of this kind of provision for young people.

A detailed technical description and details of the way the systematic review and construction of the CASE database was carried out.

Review of updating strategy

CASE commissioned the EPPI centre in October 2010 to review the approach they took to searching for and including research in the database. This provides CASE with evidence about how to undertake updates of the database which are more efficient than a simple repeat.

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Value of Engagement

This is a high level mainly non-technical report covering the recent history of attempts to derive economic values for engagement, an analysis of subjective well-being and analysis of the health cost savings from sport.

Key messages

Culture produces a wide range of values to society – in this report two key ones are address, tackling fundamental issues about how we value the core benefits of culture.

The first approach involves estimating the economic value of subjective well-being gains associated with engagement. In a ground-breaking analysis, the research establishes a statistically significant relationship between sports and arts engagement and increased subjective well-being. The analysis allows for comparisons with other domains, such as health and employment to understand the scale of these associated gains. Then the latest economic approaches for valuing these gains are applied and explored.

The second approach involves the valuing of health gains associated with sport by using agreed statistical analysis for estimating the health costs saved by doing sport. The approach is a model for applying this kind of analysis to other domains where culture and sport have impacts such as mental health and education.

A detailed technical description of the analysis covered in the equivalent summary paper. Includes all references and a depth literature review.

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Other outputs

  • The CASE database
    This database is hosted and maintained by the EPPI Centre. There are two types of access – general and restricted. Restricted access allows users to see the abstracts and summaries of the research some of which is protected intellectual property. This requires a password which may be obtained by contacting case@culture.gsi.gov.uk

  • The CASE engagement simulation model
    This model is currently only accessible via the DCMS as it requires both specialist software and specialist knowledge to run it. If you are interested in generating scenarios with the model  please contact case@culture.gsi.gov.uk

CASE design

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