The Impact of Culture on Quality of Life: Developing Approaches for Cultural Research

工具主义和管理主义在英国文化政策中的主导地位，已经产生了一种驱动力，证明文化对更广泛的政府政策目标的贡献，包括提高生活质量的总体目标。虽然文化政策话语的特点是不断重复地声称文化对生活质量的贡献，但最近的文献综述发现，很少有实证研究支持这种说法（Galloway et al, 2006）。这一审查强调了在一系列公共政策领域普遍存在的重大困难：在复杂的社会情况中孤立因果关系；评估特定因素或变量的贡献；确定活动的长期结果。它进一步表明，关于文化的社会影响的学术工作很少，并表明这一领域的工作主体，主要是委托评估，受到了许多批评。这项研究有三个主要目标：-发展对理解文化对生活质量影响的最有效的哲学方法和方法的批判性思维。它将通过回顾在生活质量研究方面有着良好记录的学术学科中发展起来的两种主要方法来做到这一点。-将文化领域公认的评估困难与更广泛的公共政策和学科背景联系起来，比较政策领域的“证据”类型和标准。-就文化的证据、工具主义和社会影响，为当前文化政策的哲学和意识形态辩论做出贡献。文献审查表明，关于文化政策研究方法的学术工作特别及时，并建议这种工作不仅有利于政府中的文化决策者和对社会影响感兴趣的文化机构，而且有利于更广泛的文化从业者和学者，他们在一系列背景下关注文化和生活质量，包括卫生、城市政策和再生。该项目将促进对新方法方法的思考，用于文化政策研究和与文化部门直接相关的未来影响评估，并将有助于从通常被忽视的文化角度对基于证据的政策进行学术辩论。

The dominance of instrumentalism and managerialism within UK cultural policy has produced a drive for evidence of culture's contribution to wider government policy aims, including the overarching goal of improved quality of life. While cultural policy discourse features constant and repeated claims for and about the contribution of culture to quality of life, a recent literature review found that there was very little empirical research to support such claims (Galloway et al, 2006). This review highlighted the significant difficulties, common across the range of public policy arenas, in: isolating causation in complex social situations; assessing the contribution of specific factors or variables; and, identifying the long term outcomes of activity. It further revealed that there is little academic work on the social impact of culture and demonstrated that the body of work in this area, mostly commissioned evaluations, has been subject to much criticism. This study has three main objectives:- to develop critical thinking about the most effective philosophical approaches and methodologies for understanding the impact of culture on quality of life. It will do this by reviewing two of the dominant approaches developed in academic disciplines with a strong record of quality of life research.- to relate the acknowledged difficulties of evaluation in the cultural field to the broader public policy and disciplinary context, comparing types and standards of 'evidence' across policy areas.- to contribute to current philosophical and ideological debates in cultural policy with respect to evidence, instrumentalism and the social impact of culture.The literature review demonstrated that academic work on cultural policy research methodologies is particularly timely and suggested that such work will benefit not only cultural policymakers in government and the cultural agencies interested in social impact, but also a much wider sphere of cultural practitioners and academics concerned with culture and quality of life in a range of contexts, including health, urban policy and regeneration. The project will advance thinking on new methodological approaches for use in cultural policy research and for future impact evaluation of direct relevance to the cultural sector, and it will contribute to scholarly debate about evidence based policy from the commonly neglected perspective of culture.