Valuing subjective well-being benefits from leisure activities: informing post-Covid public funding of arts, culture and sport

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the leisure sector as lockdowns and social distancing resulted in a temporary shutdown. Using large-scale UK social survey data from two waves of Understanding Society, we employ the life satisfaction valuation method to provide estimates of monetary values of the subjective well-being benefits of leisure activities. We find that well-being benefits to life satisfaction from arts events, visiting museums and moderate sports have a significant monetary value. The value of some leisure activities to domains of satisfaction is higher compared with life satisfaction. The value to leisure satisfaction is particularly high, especially arts activities. Well-being benefits of moderate and mild sport are particularly high for health satisfaction. Meanwhile, activities which involve social interaction, including arts events and moderate sport have greater relevance to job satisfaction. These findings evidence the value of leisure activities, informing arguments for public funding to support and aid recovery in the sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts
• culture and sport
• Covid-19 pandemic
• leisure
• life satisfaction
• subjective well-being
• public funding

Acknowledgements

Compliance with ethical standards: the research utilized secondary data, and as such did not involve research involving human participants and/or animals and/or informed consent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are some relevant questions relating to ACS participation in a later wave of the survey, wave 8, but these are only included in the youth questionnaire which is targeted at 10–15-year-olds and does not provide data comparable with that of the earlier waves.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Wheatley

Daniel Wheatley is a Reader in the Department of Management at University of Birmingham. His research focuses on well-being and work including job quality, work–life balance, flexible working arrangements and work-related travel, and he has a wider interest in relationships between aspects of time-use and well-being. He is the author of Well-being and the Quality of Working Lives andTime Well Spent: Subjective Well-being and the Organization of Time. His work has appeared in a number of edited volumes, and in peer-reviewed journals including the Cambridge Journal of Economics; Industrial Relations Journal; New Technology, Work and Employment; Work and Occupations, and; Work, Employment and Society.

Craig Bickerton

Craig Bickerton is a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Division of Nottingham Business School. His areas of research interest include well-being, welfare and the environment. He has significant previous experience of policy development and practice in these areas as a professional economist in the public sector in the UK. He is currently a member of the Economic and Social Research Bureau (ESRB) at Nottingham Business School.