Arts, Social Capital and Ageing: Towards Deeper Understandings

Social capital is a poorly understood concept, and in a context of an academic focus on how to measure it and considering changes over time, we have limited understandings about the nature of social capital and a lack of qualitative understandings into how it is actually experienced by people (Blackshaw and Long 2005). Group arts participation is recognised as a potentially valuable means of developing social capital, but again, little attention is paid to the mechanisms by which this happens, or to the actual nature of arts-generated social capital and what difference it makes in people's lives. Moreover, from a gerontological perspective, whilst interest in social capital is implicit in literature on ageing, there is little that explicitly addresses the social capital of older people.
This presentation discussed research findings that highlight the links between arts participation and social capital. It considered the distinctive nature of older people's social capital from a life course perspective, and offered qualitative understandings of the ways in which social capital is actually experienced by individuals.