'It makes me feel happy and joyful': the evaluation of arts-based social interventions in public health.

We have spent the past 2 years evaluating Sistema Scotland’s ‘Big Noise’ programme, an arts-based social intervention targeted at socioeconomically deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. Drawing inspiration from Venezuela’s decades-old ‘El Sistema’ movement, Sistema Scotland’s first programme was established in Raploch, Stirling in 2008, with their second intervention site at Govanhill, Glasgow established in 2013, and a third opening in Torry, Aberdeen in 2015. While each of these intervention sites is unique, both in terms of the neighbourhoods themselves and in the detail of programme delivery, the aims are the same: to transform children’s lives through music. ‘Big Noise’ offers every child in the intervention neighbourhood completely free musical learning, from 6 months old upwards. From age 6 until school leaving age, access to the programme expands to include instrument tuition, intensive orchestral practice and regular opportunities to perform as an orchestra. The expectation is that this builds confidence, discipline, social skills and cognitive skills that are of benefit to development and health, both in childhood and in later life. Drawing on our experience of evaluating these (and previous) interventions, we are keen to explore some of the difficulties inherent in holding arts-based social interventions like ‘Big Noise’ to account in the same way as other social and, in particular, other public health interventions. When an arts-based activity is framed as a social intervention, its underlying processes and its ultimate impacts are often compared with and measured against the impacts of other, non-arts-based social interventions. Moreover, when that arts-based social intervention is framed as having potential benefits for public health, the demands of evaluators and their audiences tend to become greater and more particular still. There is currently limited evidence, of the type that we deem ‘good quality’, that demonstrates the efficacy of artsbased social interventions in improving health and wellbeing. We suspect that part of the reason for this is that assessing the utility of such interventions from a public health perspective generates a number of challenges, captured succinctly by Ofri above. In the main, these challenges stem from the need to unpick, understand and describe the multiple processes involved in making and interacting with art in a way that is relevant to what we already know about health and well-being and what is already being done to improve it. There is also the challenge of identifying, justifying and measuring appropriate outcomes, that is, appropriate to both public health research and arts-based interventions. The difficulties here are perhaps exemplified by a 7-year old’s contribution to a group discussion on best things about ‘Big Noise’: ‘it makes me feel happy and joyful’. As part of our evaluation, we necessarily needed to translate children and young people’s descriptions of the positive aspects of their involvement in the programme into public health parlance. The resultant impacts included, for example, positive emotional experiences, pride, meaning and identity, a sense of security and enhanced self-awareness. However, identifying and (re)naming such impacts only marks the beginning of the challenges that evaluations like ours face. There is also a need to find a means of assessing how prevalent these impacts are, among which populations and