Cultural Participation Monitor

The Audience Agency's nationwide longitudinal (ongoing) panel survey of changing views about participating in creative and cultural activities through the pandemic and beyond.

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.

Headline Reports

We are regularly releasing a series of substantive reports that explore the full breadth of the monitor's findings about audiences' experiences, expectations and intentions before, during and after COVID.

Wave 3 | Summer 2021

Wave 2 | Spring 2021

Wave 1 | Autumn 2020

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 so far reported on are:

Wave 1: 6,055 responses, Oct-Nov 2020
Wave 2: 1,503 responses, Feb 2021
Wave 3: 2,002 responses, June 2021

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.

Cultural Participation Monitor

Recent Key Insights Participation and Attendance Digital Engagement Health and Wellbeing Equity and Access

"If previous certainties about audiences may no longer be a reliable guide, we’ve tried to cast new light on audiences as they are now: their experiences, behaviours, values and future intentions... This report provides an initial overview of the findings from the first wave of field work, which already offers a clear picture of the impact of COVID-19 across the whole population: how it has affected cultural engagement so far, as well as how it is likely to affect it in the future."

Deep dives into particular aspects of the monitor's findings

Willingness to Attend

Looking at which audiences are most and least willing to attend live events in the near future and which are more or less likely to have already booked for them.

Digital Engagement Report

These findings focus on the digital engagement questions from the first wave of our nationwide panel survey of changing views about participating in creative and cultural activities through the pandemic.

Vaccine Certification Effect

As of March 2021, in the short term the number of people prevented from attending by vaccine certification is likely to exceed the number of people it persuades to attend.

Inequality through COVID

Looking at Cultural Participation Monitor data to see who is more negatively impacted and how that relates to, or exacerbates, previously existing and ongoing inequalities in audiences.

First Findings from Wave 3 data

Initial findings from the June wave of our Cultural Participation Monitor show more about effects on wellbeing, slow willingness to attend, and potential impacts on engagement after the pandemic.

Audience Spectrum in the Context of COVID-19

Understand the impact of lockdown on the behaviours of different Audience Spectrum groups.