"There is a serious need for more robust and critical scholarship in the field of arts and health". Stephen Clift questions current frameworks and practices.
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Arts, Health and Wellbeing: The need for robust appraisal of research in the field (colouring in culture)
Here are some initial thoughts on the need for robust appraisal of research on the contribution of the arts to health and wellbeing. These are followed by a proposal to initiate critical debates on the current status of arts and health practice and research. Three specific provocations to practitioners and researchers will be forthcoming.
There is a serious need for more robust and critical scholarship in the field of arts and health. This is revealed by reviews of the APPG (2017) Creative Health report and the Fancourt and Finn (2019) WHO Scoping Review (Atkinson, 2018; Clift, 2020). There are also examples of recent publications in the field which are of questionable value, and which may even be described as banal, trivial, and spurious (e.g. Burns and Van Der Meer (2020) on the wellbeing benefits of crochet; Haiblum-Itskovitch, Czamanski-Cohen and Galili (2018) on the effects of materials used to draw on heart-rate variability, and Fancourt (2019) on emotion regulation through artistic creative activities).
Such publications raise questions about the standards of journal reviewing of manuscripts submitted for publication, but more fundamentally, questions on the decisions made by researchers on what lines of enquiry are important to pursue; how research is reviewed by funding bodies; and how research is reviewed and approved by ethics committees... Keep reading on Colouring in Culture