When Jacqueline Thompson, artistic director for Metro Theater Company in St. Louis, Missouri, is seeking out her next play, she said she looks for “outlier stories. Metro is really intentional about speaking to the emotional intelligence of kids, and so we look for stories that challenge them, but also stories that are so individual that students feel seen and celebrated.”

Metro Theater Company creates theatre for kids in elementary and middle schools, as well as running summer camps and touring schools with workshops on topics kids might be struggling with, like bullying or making friends. The company’s aim is to promote well-being in children through enrichment programs and hands-on theatre work. Now, thanks to a new report, companies like Metro can better understand how their programs promote youth well-being and perhaps consider new approaches.

For “Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being,” a team of researchers reviewed literature about youth arts programs and well-being, and talked to youth arts practitioners to offer a synthesis of what we already know on the topic. The prime takeaway: Most engagement with art, from walking through a museum to seeing a play, from art therapy to planning a community mural, promotes well-being in particular ways. 

“There are certain aspects to arts programming that are more likely to contribute to different kinds of well-being,” said Joie D. Acosta, a senior behavioral and social scientist at Rand, the global policy think tank that created the report, which was funded by the Wallace Foundation.

The study found there were five aspects of well-being that the arts tended to promote: One, building agency to make positive social change; two, facilitating health and wellness; three, encouraging self-expression; four, creating social connections and community; and five, developing skills and a “mastery mindset.” That led to nine outcomes, including academic and practical competencies, physical health, a positive state of mind, and economic stability. 

The aspects overlap, but some of them, like mental health and economic stability, require specific “pathways” or methods. For instance, programs that promoted self-expression didn’t lead to economic stability (though they offered other benefits). But programs that promoted developing skills, such as public speaking, problem-solving, and communication, were linked with improved economic stability.

Acosta said that figuring out how to tailor your program to a certain aspect of well-being is one of the benefits of the report. “This report will tell you not only, ‘Here’s what you should consider about the processes you put in place for your engagement program.’ It will also tell you which mechanisms will get you to what kinds of outcomes.”

Specially tailored appendices, Acosta added, provide examples of programs that already exist and which aspects of well-being they promote. The report has the additional benefit of allowing companies with programs already in place to think of new or better ways to describe how their program promotes well-being. 

“A lot of times, community-based programs, whatever they are, are having to justify their investment,” Acosta explained. “This provides real, tangible research that shows that arts engagement leads to well-being. This gives a way for existing arts programming to talk about how their work contributes to the well-being of their community.” 

The literature review has its limits: It can’t, for instance, tell you exactly which youth arts programs are most effective overall.

“We researchers, myself included, need to really step up our game in supporting high-quality research,” Acosta said. “Part of the challenge with the literature review and the question about effectiveness is that there’s not a lot of standardization in how these programs are run or how they get evaluated. So the rigorous research designs that we often consider a gold standard might not always be the best fit.”

Indeed, a lot of programs don’t write about their results. 

“We were hoping to at least be able to say, for example, that arts engagement that put kids in the driver’s seat, or allows them to have significant decision-making roles, were more effective than those where they were a passive participant,” Acosta said. “But there just weren’t enough examples out there that we could find.”

The idea of future research in this area excites Khalia Davis Philp, producing artistic director for the Coterie Theatre, a theatre for young people in Kansas City, Missouri. Earlier this year, students had the opportunity to meet Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when the Coterie staged a musical based on her book Just Ask.

“Researchers should visit classes and programs to see firsthand how effective they can be,” Philp says. “Data can only reveal so much about the truth of a young person’s lived experience. Spending time working with our teaching artists can show researchers the multiple ways we are addressing the importance of a young person’s well-being in the arts.”

Rosalind Early is deputy features editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.