Cultural Participation, Relational Goods and Individual Subjective Well-Being: Some Empirical Evidence

This paper focuses on the role of cultural participation as a source of individual subjective well-being in terms of the sociability orientation of different cultural activities. In previous works, we have found a strong association between subjective well-being and cultural participation. Here, we want to test to what extent such as association can be ascribed to the fact that cultural participation allows individuals to engage in non instrumental forms of social interaction, which are conducive to genuine forms of interpersonal relations. The test is conducted through two different evidence bases: on a survey covering Italian population and focused on the relation between culture and well-being; and an online survey of experts, ranking the 14 culturally related activities of the previous survey in terms of their sociability orientation. Our findings show that cultural participation tends to be oriented preferentially toward relatively sociable activities, thereby contributing to the production of relational goods and social capital.