Cultural Engagement of Young Adults in Het Hogeland Ivanov, Stefan ; Hoekstra, Ydwer; Arkes, Joren; Gielen, Roos
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University of Groningen Cultural Engagement of Young Adults in Het Hogeland Ivanov, Stefan ; Hoekstra, Ydwer; Arkes, Joren; Gielen, Roos IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2021 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Ivanov, S., Hoekstra, Y., Arkes, J., & Gielen, R. (2021). Cultural Engagement of Young Adults in Het Hogeland. Science Shop, University of Groningen. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 26-09-2021 University of Groningen, Groningen Faculty of Arts Career Minor Team Project Cultural Engagement of Young Adults in Het Hogeland Stefan Ivanov Ydwer Hoekstra Joren Arkes Roos Gielen S3657019 S3428370 S3545881 S3096017 [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Internal supervisor D.Z. (Djamila) Boulil [email protected] Internal supervisor drs. S.J. (Saskia) Visser [email protected] External supervisor Rixt Vellenga [email protected] Client Eltjo Dijkhuis [email protected] 24.01.2021 Word count: 10.635 words 2 Table of contents Preface............................................................................................................................................. 3 Summary ......................................................................................................................................... 5 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 7 2. Theoretical framework .............................................................................................................. 10 3. Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 13 3.1 Survey.................................................................................................................................. 14 3.2 Content Analysis ................................................................................................................. 15 3.3 Focus group ......................................................................................................................... 16 4. Empirical Analysis .................................................................................................................... 18 4.1 Results from the survey ....................................................................................................... 18 4.1.1 Level of education ........................................................................................................ 19 4.1.2 Information retrieval ..................................................................................................... 19 4.1.3 Degree of agreement of barriers ................................................................................... 21 4.1.4 List of activities that young people participate in ......................................................... 22 4.1.5. Personas ....................................................................................................................... 23 4.2 Results from the focus group .............................................................................................. 23 4.3 Results from the content analysis ........................................................................................ 26 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 29 6. Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 30 7. Advice ....................................................................................................................................... 32 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 34 Appendices .................................................................................................................................... 39 3 Preface We are a team of four students from the University of Groningen who all follow the Career Minor. The Career Minor is a minor that prepares you for the labor market and has the ultimate goal of strengthening your "employability." In concrete terms, this means strengthening the knowledge of your sector and improving skills and attitude required to function properly in the workplace. Half of the minor consists of a practical assignment, which can be an internship but we all chose to apply for a team assignment. An institution, company or government department encounters a certain problem and they ask students of the university to write an advice for them that could possibly solve the problem. Thus, we conduct research on behalf of the organization and the university. Our client is the municipality of Het Hogeland, in the north of the province Groningen. Cultural organizations in the municipality have pointed out that it is hard to get young residents engaging in cultural activities. That is why our client wants to know what kind of cultural activities would appeal to youngsters in Het Hogeland and how they can reach out to them. We are working in an interdisciplinary team to provide the municipality of Het Hogeland with advice for the problem. Ydwer Hoekstra studies History and is interested in both cultural and natural heritage. Joren Arkes is an Information Science student, he is mostly analysing and processing data, and likes to program/code. Stefan Ivanov is an international student from Bulgaria who studies International Relations & International Organization whose particular interests lie in the spheres of politics, conflict resolution, diplomacy and international peace and security. And Roos Gielen is a Media Studies student, she is particularly interested in social media and its effects on youth. Acknowledgments We would also like to extend our deepest gratitude to Djamila Z. Boulil, who was our project supervisor and coordinator, for assisting us in this project, providing feedback where needed and taking us under her wing. We are also grateful to Saskia J. Visser, who was also our project supervisor and coordinator, for providing weekly check-ups on not only the project, but also on the cooperation 4 and communication in the team and on the mental health of the team members. We would like to acknowledge the help of Sipke de Hoop, who was our career minor coordinator, for providing an office. We cannot imagine delivering such a product, if we would have had to work from home during the Covid-19 lockdown. We gratefully acknowledge the help of the municipality for providing more information on the topic when needed, helping out with the distribution of the survey, and for their trust and confidence in us. Many thanks to all the cultural institutions that provided us with their policy, vision or strategy documents and to those who took time out of their busy schedules to join our focus group. 5 Summary In this research we are looking at young adults living in the municipality Het Hogeland, aged 18 up to and including 22, and their relation to cultural engagement in Het Hogeland. We want to know what the cultural demands of this target group are and what kind of activities are considered as cultural according to them. We were asked by the municipality Het Hogeland to look if there are any discrepancies between what is demanded and what is supplied in the cultural sector in their municipality, and if there are any thresholds that young people might experience that prevent them from participating in cultural activities. As an approach, we chose to look at the problem from a new perspective. Combined with the so-called democratization of culture, which is a common strategy in cultural policy, we wanted to strengthen a cultural democracy in Het Hogeland. This means that not only the access to the existing cultural offer is improved, but that it is accepted that all everyday creativity is culture and that people are helped to develop this creativity within a supportive environment. This way, every form of culture can bloom side by side and every person within the society can be culturally active. In this report, we discuss our literature study and look at the cultural needs of the target group by creating, distributing and later analyzing the results from a survey; we analyze what is preventing young adults in engaging in cultural activities; and finally, by examining what the current policies of cultural organizations in Het Hogeland are with a content analysis, we will put emphasis on how and if