The National Endowment for the Arts recently released the arts related results of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Unlike the Survey on Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) which asks people about their behavior across the previous 12 months, the Pulse Survey asks about people’s behavior in the previous 30 days. They say this provides greater detail of the rate at which people are engaging with arts related activities post-Covid. The Pulse survey was conducted between April – July 2024.

There is both a summary press release and a more detailed report available.

In addition to asking people how often they engaged in arts attendance and arts creation and their perception of the availability of arts and cultural amenities in their community, the Pulse Survey specifically asked new questions related to loneliness and social connection. The data shows the response of attendees, creators, non-attendees, and non-creators to questions about participation in social clubs/activities, phone conversations with family and friends, and spending time with family and friends.

I was somewhat perplexed that they did not address how age and other demographic factors may have impacted whether people spoke on the phone with family and friends as they did with other categories. They only broke down the results in terms of attendees vs non-attendees and creators vs. non-creators.

In terms of loneliness and social support, for the most part those that attended events experienced less loneliness than non-attendees and creators experienced it less than non-creators. Similarly, those who perceived themselves as having access to arts activities also felt loneliness less than those who perceived themselves as having low or no access.

However, there was a noted exception in the creator category:

Adults who created art were more likely to report experiencing loneliness “sometimes” or “rarely” (31.9 and 34.7 percent, respectively) than were those who had not created art (27.2 and 32.2 percent, respectively). However, at least some level of loneliness proved more familiar to creators of art than to non-creators. That is, 18.4 percent of those who created art in the last month reported “never” experiencing loneliness, versus 27.3 percent of those who did not create art.

There were somewhat similar results related to feeling social and emotional support. Those who attended or created art or those who felt they had high access to arts resources felt a greater level of support than those who didn’t attend, create or have access to resources.

Again there was a difference on the absolute end of the scale among creatives (my emphasis)

Adults who created art were more likely to say they usually received social support than those who did not create art (38.8 percent compared to 30.2 percent for non-creators “usually” receiving support). Arts creators were also less likely to say they never received support (4.1 percent versus 10.1 percent of non-creators). However, non-creators were more likely to say they “always” receive social and emotional support than were arts creators (28.8 percent of creators versus 24.6 percent of non-creators).

While I have some theories bumping around my head, I am not exactly sure what all the implications of that might be. On a very basically level of course, the creative act will always require a degree of loneliness associated with it. Even if you are in a large orchestra, there is a lot of time spent practicing alone. Even in a small music group the folks writing the words and lyrics may feel isolated from other members of the group. And the creative who hasn’t felt they don’t have social and emotional support for their endeavors are few indeed.