What are the challenges and opportunities of subjective well-being practices in Dutch museums from both the cultural policy’s and museum’s perspective?

Nowadays, museums are not only in charge of conserving, presenting and developing a collection of museal objects. They are also expected to provide educational, participative and social experiences. Museums offer cultural participation possibilities to their audiences. Earlier research proves that cultural participation within the museum context, museum participation, contributes to the subjective well-being of visitors. Scholars have defined the demographic, behaviour, personality and determinants of subjective well-being. These determinants appear to be built on cultural and social values, which can be reached through museum participation. Subjective well-being effects, fosered by museum practices, benefit the participant’s health and can consequently be considered as spillover effects to the health sector. In order to determine the correlation between the museum field and the health sector and the effects they have on macroeconomic level, these spillover effects need to be well-defined, structured and measured. However a sufficient amount of research on well-being effects of cultural participations exists, this objective is rarely implemented in museum’s strategies. This research aims to demonstrate insights on the actual meaning of subjective well-being in the museum sector of the Netherlands from both the museum’s and cultural policy’s perspective. Furthermore, this research seeks to detect the challenges and opportunities of subjective well-being practices in he museum sector from both perspectives and clarify the interdependency between them. Consequently, this research seeks to answer the following research question: “What are the challenges and opportunities of subjective well-being practices in Dutch museums from both the cultural policy’s and museum’s perspective?”, and the sub-question: “What is the interdependency between both perspectives?”. In order to answer the research questions, semi-structured interviews with Dutch museum representatives and cultural policy experts were conducted. Furthermore, secondary data resources were used to analyse Dutch cultural policy and the instruments it provides for museums. This research proves that awareness about subjective well-being practices in the museum sector is the main challenge. The biggest threshold in realising these practices turns out to be limited resources for museums and a lack of knowledge of subjective well-being practices for cultural policy organisations. Despite these challenges, this research presents several opportunities in regard to subjective well-being practices in museums such as: networking, research and development, social impact, strategy, measurement and funding. Moreover, this study proves that both museums and cultural policy organisations already apply an implicit subjective well-being discourse, which is interrelated to each other by means of museum strategies.