Arts for a Change: Collegiate Arts Attendance as a Mechanism of Social and Civic Growth

Abstract

The study uses the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education to test how arts attendance in college facilitates growth in socially responsible leadership, diversity orientation, and the importance of political and social involvement. The study uses the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) and the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale (M-GUDS) to understand changes in socially responsible leadership and orientation toward diversity. Using the quasi-experimental design of inverse treatment probability weighting with doubly robust estimation, the analyses indicate that arts attendance in the first year of college has a positive dosage effect on student-rated importance of social and political involvement, increases the SRLS score of those attending arts events very often, and improves students’ M-GUDS score among those attending often. Finally, arts attendance at any level has a positive influence on students’ interest in participating in diverse social and cultural activities. We provide additional analyses concerning SRLS and M-GUDS sub-scales.

Notes

¹ For this study, arts attendance refers to how often students attend an art exhibit, gallery, play, dance, or other theater performance during their first-year experience.

² For a complete list of schools, see https://centerofinquiry.org/wabash-national-study-participants/.

³ For more information on the development and use of the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale, please see https://srls.umd.edu.

⁴ Please contact authors for tables indicating balance.

⁵ Please contact authors for a full list of tables concerning the conditional effects of arts attendance based upon gender, parental education, and race/ethnicity.

⁶ For more information, see Wabash College. (n.d.). The Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS). Retrieved from https://wabash.edu/news/displaystory.cfm?news_ID=2647.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

WeiLin Chen

^a

Wei-Lin Chen ([email protected]) is assistant professor of Center for Teacher Education at the National Sun Yat-sen University. His work focuses on the cause and consequence of educational and socioeconomic disparities on college students’ development.

Mitchell David Lingo

^b

Mitchell D. Lingo ([email protected]) is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on extracurricular activities and outside the classroom behaviors of students and how they serve to reproduce or mitigate class differences in outcomes.