Assessing well-being outcomes for arts and heritage activities: Development of a Museum Well-being Measures toolkit

Many museums and galleries offer services directed at improving the health and well-being of their audiences. Despite this increasing area of activity there is no standardized method for assessing the impact on participants. Recent research into heritage-in-health revealed the need for a culture-specific toolkit of measures to assess the well-being of adults participating in museum, arts and heritage activities. A pre-trial survey of UK specialist museums ascertained how a toolkit might be used and what methods of evaluation already existed. Prototypes were trialled over twelve months and a post-trial survey was conducted prior to production of the toolkit. Statistically reliable measures were constructed for positive and negative emotion. Comparison of pretest-posttest differences showed highly significant increases in positive scores and decreases in negative scores with medium to large effect sizes. All words in the measures contributed to changes in emotion. Full and short Generic Well-being Questionnaires (GWQ) were developed for people with dementia.