Choir Participation and Community Wellbeing: A Social Identity Approach

Abstract

Research about choir and community wellbeing shows that there is a positive association between the two constructs. In addition, the positive association between choir participation and community wellbeing seems to be stronger if the activity fosters a place to socialize and gain an identity through the leisure pursuit. This research looks at the relationship between choir participation and community wellbeing using Social Identity Approach (SIA). SIA suggests that participants benefit from a leisure activity to the degree in which they identify themselves with the group. This research takes SIA into consideration to explain the positive relationship between choir participation and community wellbeing, where social opportunities and social identity mediates the positive association between participating in a choir and community wellbeing. A serial mediation model was designed to test the positive association between the two variables. Social opportunities and social identity were added to the mediation model to test their indirect effect on choir participations positive effect on wellbeing. Social opportunities variable was placed as the antecedent variable to consequent variable of social identity. Findings show that choir participation is positively associated to community wellbeing. In addition, results show that the positive effect is fully mediated by social opportunities and social identity provided by the choir.