This research starts from a belief that everyone’s experiences, and everyone’s cultural engagement, matters. That we cannot understand the cultural impact of this moment without listening to the whole of our society. And that we need to recognise the different situations from which people came into this crisis and the different ways — whether in its apparent changeability, or in reinforcing existing disadvantages — that it has affected people as they have passed through it. We hope that it will also help us to ‘build back better’, responding to a far wider range of experiences and needs than before.
“We're starting to get some clues about what the new cultural landscape may look like after COVID-19, with people increasingly keen to get back to live attendance - especially younger and metropolitan groups - but with a risk of some others being left out. Ensuring disabled people aren't excluded is key, and so is adapting to the persistence of home working, which is likely to encourage more local attendance."
- Oliver Mantell, Director of Evidence and Insight
Quarterly Key Findings
About the Monitor
This research is part of a national research programme led by the Centre for Cultural Value in collaboration with the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and The Audience Agency. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 rapid rolling call. This collaborative approach is what has allowed us to conduct such an extensive national programme of ongoing research, helping us to understand and track changes in the public’s cultural participation through and beyond COVID-19.
Key things to note about this research are that it:
- Samples the whole population
- Covers all sectors
- Shows change over time
- Is linked to Audience Spectrum
'Waves' of the Cultural Participation Monitor Survey:
- Wave 1: 6,055 responses, Oct-Nov 2020
- Wave 2: 1,503 responses, Feb 2021
- Wave 3: 2,002 responses, June 2021
- Wave 4: 2,025 responses, Sept 2021
- Wave 5: 6,057 responses, Nov 2021
- Wave 6: 3,197 responses, March 2022
We will continue to build on this foundation to provide an ever-richer understanding of our communities and their cultural engagement. Importantly, this research is focussed on the whole of the UK public and will track and explore their behaviours, attitude and intentions throughout and beyond the crisis, running in a series of further waves of nationally representative panel surveys well into 2022.