Our Creative Community Wellbeing Scale
A co-designed evaluation tool enabling creative practitioners to measure changes in young people’s wellbeing
Showing how arts and creativity can improve young people’s health and wellbeing is at the heart of our creative engagement programme.
Yet, being able to demonstrate the impact of this programme has proved challenging, as suitable tools for measuring the changes in wellbeing young people experience through creative project participation have been hard to find, or apply.
That is until now. Working with young people from Kinetika Bloco and experts from Brunel University London we’ve created the Southbank Centre Creative Community Wellbeing Scale; completing an initial validation with 241 young participants across Kinetika Bloco’s summer schools.
Be a part of future validation studies
We’re planning to expand validation of our Creative Community Wellbeing Scale across diverse community contexts. To be contacted when ethics approval is in place and the validation study launches please register your interest.
The background
The route to our wellbeing scale began in spring 2024, through a collaboration with Brunel University London and one of our Resident Organisations, Kinetika Bloco. Together we explored how we could effectively evaluate the impact of our youth programme in a way that centres the young people and captures real insights into wellbeing change.
Thanks to seed funding from UK Research and Innovation, we were able to work with 20 young researchers from Kinetika Bloco and a team from Brunel University London, led by Professor Dominik Havsteen-Franklin, to develop and pilot a first wellbeing scale for young people.
Using the Nominal Group Technique we then developed the scale through a series of structured exercises. These sessions, which involved in-depth discussions with young people, helped identify key wellbeing themes – including social connection, emotional balance, psychological growth, cultural appreciation, and creative expression.
A World Café–style approach was then used to generate and refine the items on the scale, ensuring the content was inclusive, sensitive to diverse perspectives, and accessible in its language. We also worked with an artist and designer to make the scale less clinical and more visually appealing to its young participants.
The initial validation with 241 young people showed promising psychometric properties. However, further validation across diverse community contexts is needed in order to establish broader reliability and validity. A peer-reviewed academic paper detailing the validation findings has been submitted for further peer review.
Chloe Watts
Chloe Watts is a freelance illustrator-animator passionate about tackling mental health stigmas, particularly for young people. With her help – developing multiple iterations of the scale, refining illustrations and aspects of accessibility in close collaboration with Kinetika Bloco’s researchers – we were able to make our wellbeing scale a much more interactive and engaging tool.
Visualising the scale
Get an idea of the look and feel of our wellbeing scale with these illustrations by Chloe Watts.
Using our wellbeing scale
What our wellbeing scale measures
The scale has been co-designed with young artists and covers six wellbeing areas:
Creative wellbeing
creative expression and pride in creative achievements
Social & relational wellbeing
feeling supported and encouraged, belonging and having friends, absence of loneliness
Psychological wellbeing
confidence around others, not feeling unfairly judged
Community wellbeing
contributing to welcoming spaces, shared sense of joy
Emotional wellbeing
sadness, loneliness, self-criticism
Cultural wellbeing
feeling that people appreciate one’s culture
These areas of wellbeing reflect young people’s priorities – those of collective belonging, social responsibility, shared joy and motivation, as opposed to individualised constructs like autonomy or formal resilience.
How and when to use our wellbeing scale
To help determine whether our wellbeing scale is right for your project, consider the following questions.
Do I need to show funders that wellbeing improved?
If yes, use this scale.
Do I need to prove our programme works better than doing nothing?
If yes, you’ll need comparison data (a control group).
Do I need to measure creative skills?
If yes, you’ll need additional assessment methods.
Do I want to track longer-term impact?
If yes, you’ll need to administer the scale at additional follow-up points.
And if you ever find yourself asking of a project, what wellbeing changes are associated with this programme?
That is the time to use our wellbeing scale, as it provides robust impact evidence for funders and learning. For effectiveness claims, make sure to add comparison conditions or mixed methods.
Understanding impact versus effectiveness
Our wellbeing scale measures impact (whether participants’ wellbeing changed after your programme). Without a comparison group, it cannot measure effectiveness (whether your programme caused those changes). Both are valuable. Impact shows what happened; effectiveness shows why. Most community arts organisations need impact evidence.
Our wellbeing scale can show:
What wellbeing changes occurred
Which areas improved most
The size of changes (small, moderate, large)
Patterns across programme cohorts
Whether wellbeing stayed stable or declined
Our wellbeing scale (alone) can not show:
Whether your programme caused the changes
If your programme works better than others
Long-term impact beyond the measurement period
Skill development or creative competencies
Behavioural changes (attendance, engagement)
Community-level change
Future validation research
We’re planning to expand validation of our creative Community Wellbeing Scale across diverse community arts contexts to strengthen the evidence base. This research phase will require ethics approval and partnership agreements.
Validation Goal
Collect data from 500 participants to statistically validate the scale across varied settings.
Participating organisations will receive*:
- full support to use the wellbeing scale
- standardised protocols and guidance materials
- statistical analysis by Brunel University London assessing changes in wellbeing across six domains
- acknowledgement of their contribution to sector-wide evaluation infrastructure.
(*once ethics approval is in place)
Eligibility criteria for validation research
To take part in this pilot phase of our wellbeing scale, your project should meet the following criteria:
- Involves a creative workshop or programme in a community context within the UK.
- Participants are aged 15 – 25.
- You will be able to complete both pre and post-project questionnaires with the same participants.
The scale is currently available in English only, in both digital and paper formats, with different colour schemes to support accessibility needs.
Be a part of future validation studies
Once validation is complete, we aim to develop a digital platform (expected 2026) so that organisations can analyse their own wellbeing data independently.
Please register your interest to be contacted when the validation study launches.