Course Outline
This course introduces the knowledge base of how community resources, including arts, culture and heritage activities can improve our physical and mental health and wellbeing.
This is an online self-guided course. It has 5 modules and takes approximately 4 hours to complete.
• Introduction to the course
• Module 1: The health benefits of engagement
• Module 2: The predictors of engagement
• Module 3: Active ingredients
• Module 4: Mechanisms of action
• Module 5: Modelling complexity
The course is open to all, but is aimed at early careers researchers and community organisations with an interest in understanding how community resources, including arts, culture and heritage activities can improve our physical and mental health and wellbeing.
This course was developed by the Social Biobehavioural Research Group with the Royal Society for Public Health.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of the course, you will understand:
- What ‘health’ is and the evidence for the influence of arts activities on health outcomes.
- The barriers people face to accessing arts activities and how interventions and policies can be designed to help overcome them.
- The active ingredients or components of arts activities that may lead to health and wellbeing outcomes.
- The biological, social, psychological and behavioural mechanisms through which arts activities can affect mental and physical health and wellbeing.
- The contextual factors or moderators that influence how the arts affect our health.
- How researchers can adopt the principles of complexity science to examine the effect of arts activities on health.
Our work investigates how social connections and behaviours impact people’s health. By conducting cutting-edge, cross disciplinary research, our aim is to determine how our health is influenced by both social ‘assets’ and ‘deficits’. These include social relationships, arts and culture, leisure, nature, and social prescribing (assets), as well as loneliness, isolation, and social restrictions (deficits).
We investigate how these factors affect individual and population health, the underlying ingredients and mechanisms, and how these effects vary across society. This then advances understanding of how policies and practice might evolve to improve population health.
