ABSTRACT
Policymakers increasingly look at culture to improve well-being. Concurrently, growing bodies of research address the relationship between the two. However, most studies focus on cultural participation in specific demarcated types of culture – visual arts, dance, theatre – and how these impact the well-being of particular groups, like the elderly, ill, or displaced. This chapter takes a different approach, investigating the relationship between all sorts of cultural activities and well-being from an open-ended, bottom-up perspective. The researchers asked a diverse range of 65 interview participants in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to define whatever culture means to them and how culture affects their well-being, such as physical and mental health, feelings of communal belonging, or their individuality. The thematic content analysis of the interviews revealed that the participants consider culture and well-being strongly related. While the chapter focuses on commonalities in interviewees’ experiences across the three countries, there are notable differences in how foreign and native-born interviewees experience culture’s relation to well-being. Migrants more often reflect on broader cultural conditions in their current countries of residence that influence their sense of well-being. Furthermore, interviewees’ in-depth descriptions elucidate how culture enhances well-being in multiple ways, adding an interpretative dimension to research literature where mechanisms behind the observed effects are often left unexplained.
