Constructing Change that Lasts: A Grounded Theory Study of Community-Based Arts' Creation of Social Impacts

The body of literature concerning social impacts of the arts, including research substantiating individual-level outcomes of arts participation, has grown a great deal in recent years, as has the Community Arts field's pursuit of more rigorous and useful evaluation approaches in light of challenging, contemporary demands on organizations. However, extant research has not fully answered how community-based arts organizations (CBAOs) conceptualize their pursuit of outcomes, what mechanisms underlie those pursuits, and how this translates into external impacts. In order to help fill gaps in the literature and contribute to evaluation efforts, this study applied a community psychology approach and utilized Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 1995) to build upon a previous study that explored one CBAO's conceptualization and enactment of its goals (Scheibler, 2011). Through a close, multi-phased analysis of pre-collected (n=7) and newly collected interviews (n=11) of long-term and former participants of three representative CBAOs, the present study pursued new understandings of how participants' subjective experiences of program-fostered change processes convert to external and potentially longer-lasting impacts. This research revealed how participants were engaged by strengths-based program structures that fostered sense of community; how they were impacted by four change mechanisms: 1) fostering healthy maturation, 2) developing professional competencies, 3) building a creative foundation, and, 4) promoting change agent characteristics; and how transformative meaning-making enabled them to form new understandings of themselves, others, and society, which may enable them to be critical, productive, and life-long learners who can enact change in their communities.