In this report, the authors summarize findings from a literature review they conducted to investigate themes and gaps in the existing multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between the arts and youth well-being. Drawing on these findings, they offer recommendations to fill research gaps and promote the cross-disciplinary partnerships needed to untangle the complex strands of literature and weave them back together in a meaningful way.

Stitching the Threads Together

A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being

Joie D. Acosta, Lia Pak, Devin McCarthy, Rhianna C. Rogers, William Marcellino, Maya Rabinowitz, Isabelle González, Theo Jacobs, Leah Dion

ResearchPublished Mar 4, 2025

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Includes Annex of Literature on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being

Promoting the well-being of all youth today can lead to productive, successful, and healthy adults and the health of society tomorrow. But promoting the well-being of all youth is not simple: It requires a multifaceted set of pathways and strategies that are still being defined in the research literature. A large and growing body of research on youth, well-being, and the arts exists, but it is fragmented across multiple disciplines (e.g., psychology, education) and areas (e.g., different art forms, different definitions of youth well-being and arts engagement). In this report, the authors summarize findings from a literature review they conducted to investigate global themes and gaps in the current multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between the arts and youth well-being. The authors used an equity-centered environmental scan to extract nuanced insights from the vast repository of information. Drawing on these insights, they provide recommendations that offer ways to fill gaps in current research and promote the cross-disciplinary partnerships needed to untangle the complex strands of literature and weave them back together in a meaningful way.

Key Findings

  • Research studies have found that arts engagement is an effective way to promote well-being. However, the literature on arts and youth well-being is not guided by a common framework and thus remains fragmented (approached differently by discipline, theoretical orientation, and level of rigor).
  • The literature review identified five complex and interrelated mechanisms that promote youth well-being through arts engagement and could be a starting point toward a common framework: building agency to make positive social change, facilitating healing and wellness, encouraging self-expression, creating social connection and community, and developing skills and a mastery mindset.
  • These mechanisms were associated with nine well-being dimensions: academic and practical competencies, productivity and employability, cultural and spiritual beliefs and values, economic stability, civic engagement and community safety, connectedness to others and their environment, a positive state of mind, physical health, and feelings of inclusion and justice.
  • Research specifically discussing the direction or sequence of the relationship between mechanisms and well-being dimensions was limited.

Recommendations

  • Build cross-disciplinary partnerships to bring together the diversity of approaches identified in the literature. Use these partnerships to define what research rigor means for arts and well-being studies, when multisite and longitudinal research is appropriate, and which youth populations need support or study.
  • Improve partnerships with researchers and practitioners working in the areas of arts and community organizing to catalyze the development and study of arts engagement efforts that build agency to promote positive social change.
  • Bring together practitioners and researchers focused on the interpersonal and community levels to set a shared agenda and advance collective, holistic efforts. Conduct more research to identify the characteristics that define an effective safe space and how communities with more (or fewer) safe spaces benefit.
  • Define and test youth-led arts engagement approaches to determine whether having youth leadership translates into better (or worse) well-being outcomes. Conduct more research studies that quantify the relative contributions of art forms to well-being by mechanism. Conduct more research on the well-being impacts of less studied art forms.
  • Bring together academic institutions; arts organizations; and correctional, criminal justice, labor, and economic organizations to develop new efforts and better document existing ones.
  • Document how to equitably implement the mechanisms for arts engagement and their impacts on inequities in youth well-being.
  • Develop innovative study designs and measures and test whether they are reliable and effective through researcher and practitioner collaboration.

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RAND Style Manual

Acosta, Joie D., Lia Pak, Devin McCarthy, Rhianna C. Rogers, William Marcellino, Maya Rabinowitz, Isabelle González, Theo Jacobs, and Leah Dion, Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being, RAND Corporation, RR-A3264-1, 2025. As of April 8, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3264-1.html

Chicago Manual of Style

Acosta, Joie D., Lia Pak, Devin McCarthy, Rhianna C. Rogers, William Marcellino, Maya Rabinowitz, Isabelle González, Theo Jacobs, and Leah Dion, Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3264-1.html.
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