Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being

Promoting the well-being of all youth today can lead to productive, successful, and healthy adults and the health of society tomorrow. But promoting the well-being of all youth is not simple: It requires a multifaceted set of pathways and strategies that are still being defined in the research literature. A large and growing body of research on youth, well-being, and the arts exists, but it is fragmented across multiple disciplines (e.g., psychology, education) and areas (e.g., different art forms, different definitions of youth well-being and arts engagement). In this study, the authors summarize findings from a literature review they conducted to investigate global themes and gaps in the current multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between the arts and youth well-being. The authors used an equity-centered environmental scan to extract nuanced insights from the vast repository of information. Drawing on these insights, they provide recommendations that offer ways to fill gaps in current research and promote the cross-disciplinary partnerships needed to untangle the complex strands of literature and weave them back together in a meaningful way.