The impact of theatre on social competencies: a meta-analytic evaluation

ABSTRACT

Background

There has been agrowing interest in using artistic interventions as a method of developing interpersonal competence. This paper presents a meta-analysis evaluating the impact of theatre interventions on social competencies.

Methods

Twenty-one primary studies totaling 4064 participants were included, presenting evidence available since 1983. Included studies were assessed in terms of quality, heterogeneity, and publication bias.

Results

Our findings indicated that active theatre participation significantly improved participants’ empathic abilities, social communication, tolerance, and social interactions, with the largest pooled effect size for social communication (0.698) and the smallest for tolerance (0.156). Our findings did not corroborate the impact of theatre on self-concept.

Conclusions

This paper shows that theatre interventions have a positive impact on social competencies. The paper makes a methodological contribution by showing that randomized and non-randomized studies yielded comparably valid results.

KEYWORDS:

• Theatre
• drama
• artistic interventions
• communication
• social interactions
• empathy
• tolerance
• self-concept

Disclosure statement

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

Data Archiving and Sharing

The raw data have been made available on the Open Science Framework’s website: https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https%3A%2F%2Fosf.io%2Fds46w%2Fdownload

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2022.2130947

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by The National Science Centre in Poland (grant number: 2017/01/X/HS2/01470) and by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014–2021 (UMO-2020/37/K/HS6/02772).