Patterns of arts engagement and other health behaviours in 22 Countries and Territories

Research from different disciplines has highlighted the importance of health behaviours, yet the definition of these behaviours and the activities they encompass have evolved over time. While behaviours such as alcohol use, smoking and physical activity are widely recognised for their health values, newer forms of behaviour including social media use have recently joined the public health discussions, and arts engagement is now emerging as another potential behaviour to health and wellbeing. Given this, the current study is designed to identify underlying patterns of health behaviour clusters when including arts engagement alongside other well-recognised health behaviours (physical activity, social media use, smoking and alcohol use), analysing data from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS). This study aims to make two innovations in the field. First, instead of examining a single country independently, we will leverage the multi-national nature of the GFS to identify underlying patterns of health behaviours clusters. Testing if a standardised clustering approach can be applied meaningfully across countries is important to ascertaining if cross-country comparisons can be undertaken. Second, we will explore what factors are associated with different health behaviour clusters.