Cultural Participation and Life Satisfaction in Rotterdam Neighborhoods: a Multilevel Analysis of the Moderating Effect of Collective Efficacy

The effect of cultural participation on life satisfaction has become a central issue in both scholarly debate and cultural policies. Although many academic studies demonstrate a positive relationship between cultural participation and life satisfaction, empirical evidence remains inconclusive. Additionally, although scholars emphasize the importance of including contextual factors in research on cultural participation, the way social context shapes this particular relationship has often been neglected in previous research. This study contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of cultural participation on life satisfaction among residents of Rotterdam, and the potential moderating role of neighborhood collective efficacy in this relationship. As a superdiverse city, Rotterdam functions as a relevant case study for understanding how the neighborhood context affects the relationship between cultural participation and life satisfaction. This study draws on data from the 2024 set of the Wijkprofiel Rotterdam, with 13,917 cases nested in 85 neighborhoods. Through a four-step multilevel regression analysis, this study tested the direct effects of three types of cultural participation on life satisfaction, followed by the interaction effects between neighborhood collective efficacy and cultural participation. The results show that the frequency of participating in both receptive cultural activities and sports or creative cultural activities has a positive effect on life satisfaction, with the strongest effect for receptive activities. No effect was found for local cultural attendance. Additionally, the results show that the effect of cultural participation does not vary across neighborhoods, and collective efficacy does not moderate the effect of cultural participation on life satisfaction. These findings indicate that both receptive and creative forms of cultural participation have a positive effect on life satisfaction, but that these effects are not moderated by the level of collective efficacy in the neighborhood of residence. The results of this thesis contribute to a better understanding of the effects of cultural participation on well-being, and how these effects may be shaped by local contextual factors.