New Data Reveal How Adults Participated in the Arts During COVID … – National Endowment for the Arts

A masked audience watches a performance at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2020. Photo courtesy of the Lied Center for Performing Arts at University of Nebraska.

Washington, DCWhat was the impact of COVID-19 on arts participation? New research released today by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) notes that between July 2021 and July 2022, more than half of all adults created and/or performed artsimilar to findings in 2017, the last time the survey was conducted. During the same time period, just under half of all adults attended in-person arts events, a significant drop from 2017. A separate survey shows that 82 percent of respondents watched or listened to arts activities through digital media between 2021 and 2022. These and other findings about in-person and virtual arts participation, and about adults reading habits, are available in two new NEA research publications: Arts Participation Patterns in 2022: Highlights from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and Online Audiences for Arts Programming: A Survey of Virtual Participation Amid COVID-19.

Chair of the NEA, Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, said, The National Endowment for the Arts has a longstanding commitment to providing the arts and culture field and the general public with accurate and relevant research. Taken together, these reports help to reveal the state of arts participation in our country and serve as an important resource in understanding areas that are growing in interest, those that showed a decline, as well as demographic gaps in participation, among other trends.

Since 1982, the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) has been administered roughly every five years by the U.S. Census Bureau. This report is the first look through the lens of federal survey data at how adults participated in arts activities for one year of the pandemic: a 12-month period from July 2021 to July 2022. The report examines areas such as attending arts events, personally creating or performing art, reading books or literature, watching or listening to arts content via media, or learning an art form. A comprehensive statistical report of the 2022 SPPA data will be released next year.

Key findings from this report include:

Art Making:

Arts AttendanceIn-person:

Arts Consumption Via Media:

Reading:

Demographic Differences:

Raw data for the full 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts will be available later this year at the NEAs National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture.

The 2022 General Social Survey (GSS), administered by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, is another tool for understanding arts participation. Supported by the NEA in partnership with the National Science Foundation, the 2022 GSS Arts Module asked respondents to reflect on their arts experiences during the first year of the pandemic (from March 2020 to March 2021) and to report whether, in the most recent 12-month period, they participated at a higher, lower, or identical rate. The report also examines how responses varied by demographic subgroup.

Key findings from this report include:

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New Data Reveal How Adults Participated in the Arts During COVID ... - National Endowment for the Arts