Overview

Widening the Lens: Social inequality and arts participation provides a picture of the socio-economic factors that shape people’s engagement with arts and culture.

Analysing data from the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated’s (ACSPRI) 2019 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), this report identifies the ways in which income, education, occupation, geography, self-identified class and trust in society interact with cultural participation.

The AuSSA survey presented an opportunity for us to tap into an existing survey that explored socio-economic conditions in Australia. Creative Australia included additional questions on arts participation, aligned with those in our National Arts Participation Survey (NAPS), and used these to explore correlations between arts engagement and other social factors in Australia.

The research outputs for this project are as follows:

• Widening the Lens: Social inequality and arts participation report: The overall trends identified in Widening the Lens align with those seen in NAPS, e.g. the percentage of the population who are engaged with arts, and barriers and motivations to arts participation. However, this report also provides important nuance and necessary detail to our understanding of who has access to arts and culture, and why. This report has been prepared with analytical support from the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra.
• Social factors in cultural participation: Factsheets and summary – in partnership with the University of Canberra and RMIT, we explored further insights from ACSPRI’s 2019 AuSSA in a series of four factsheets called Social Factors in Cultural Participation. A summary of the data presented across the four factsheets is also available.