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The effect of school-based arts instruction on attendance at museums and the performing arts
POETI('S ELSEVIER
Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
The effect of school-based arts instruction on attendance at museums and the performing arts Kimberly Kracman Department of Sociology, 2-N-2 Green Hall, Princeton Unioersity, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Abstract
In this essay, I use new data from the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts to show that arts instruction provided solely through the school has a significant positive effect on adult participation in the high status arts, independent of measures of family background. I construct two logistic regression analyses which estimate separately the effects of childhood arts lesson taking in and outside of school on attendance at art museums and the elite performing arts, when parents' education and subject's gender, race, age, type of residence, income, and education are held constant. I also construct two separate logistic regression analyses which estimate the effects on school-based lesson taking and lesson taking outside of school of parents' education, gender, race, and age. My findings suggest that the schools' provision of exposure to the arts has a significant effect on students' long-term cultural orientation, independent of measures of family influence.
1. Introduction
Recognition of the importance of cultural capital for the maintenance of stratification systems has generated interest in identifying the mechanism by which fluency in prestigious cultural styles is acquired (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978; Mohr and DiMaggio, 1996). Of particular interest is the relative influence of families and schools on children's socialization. Schools are supposed to provide the cognitive tools necessary for students to make the most of their abilities, thus serving to reduce differences in life chances which arise from differences in family resources. Bourdieu (1977) argues, however, that in reality success in school is predetermined by the cultural resources of the family, such that schools function primarily to certify and legitimate the continued high status of children from high status families, and to explain the lesser educational and, ultimately, occupational attainment of children who enter school with less exposure to the high status cultural styles which schools favor. 0304-422X/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII S 0 3 0 4 - 4 2 2 X ( 9 6 ) 0 0 0 0 9 - 5
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If the school's primary effect is to certify as superior those cultural styles already practiced by students from high status families, then one would expect school-based instruction nominally designed to provide first-time exposure to high status cultural objects and practices to be largely ineffective in altering students' long-term cultural orientation (except perhaps for the occasional instance of mobility, which Bourdieu argues is required for the maintenance of the education system's reputation as an agent of meritocracy). One would expect, on the other hand, to find a very strong, even exclusive, correlation between cultural orientation and family-based inputs. In the following analysis, I use data provided by the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) to estimate the relative effects of school and family-based inputs on individuals' orientation toward institutionally certified high status culture, as indicated by attendance at museums and the high status performing arts. My analysis uses information newly provided by the 1992 SPPA on the source of arts instruction (in school or outside of school) and the age at which lessons were taken, as well as information on mother's and father's educational attainment and various demographic characteristics. From these new data, I construct two logistic regression analyses which estimate the effects of arts education - both taking arts lessons outside of school and taking lessons only in school - on orientation to institutionally certified high status culture, as indicated by reported attendance at art museums and the performing arts. Parents' educational attainment and subject's educational attainment, income, race, gender, age, and type of residence serve as control variables in the models. I also construct two logistic regression equations which estimate the effects on school-based lesson taking and lesson taking outside of school of parents' education and subject's gender, race, and age. If solely school-based instruction in the arts has a negligible effect on adult orientation toward high status cultural practices, then one would expect to find little or no association between school-based instruction in the arts and reported attendance at museums and the performing arts, once family background is controlled. One would alternatively expect to find significant correlations between lessons taken outside of school and adult participation in the fine arts, inasmuch as such lessons reflect the special interest and efforts of the individual's parents in providing for the child's socialization in the arts. If, however, subjects who received childhood instruction in the arts solely through the schools are found, as adults, to attend museums and high-prestige performing arts events (practices which Bourdieu and others specify as indicators of the possession of cultural capital) at significantly higher rates than otherwise comparable subjects who had no childhood arts instruction, then new evidence will exist for the ability of the schools (at least, in the United States) to provide those students who have received small inheritances of cultural capital with a site for socialization into high status cultural practices.
2. Defining high status culture: The meaning of 'cultural capital' 'Cultural capital' represents the ability to communicate fluently those cultural styles which are certified as superior by institutions of cultural authority and recognized as
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legitimate at the societal level. Sociologists of culture and education have demonstrated the importance of cultural capital for entrance into higher levels of educational and occupational attainment (Bourdieu, 1977; see DiMaggio, this issue, for a review). DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) used longitudinal data from the Project Talent Survey to show how cultural capital (operationalized as a composite of interest in, performance of, and attendance at fine arts events, and self-recognition as a 'cultured person') is positively correlated with educational and occupational attainment. Similarly, Randall Collins (1979) has argued that high status cultural attributes have historically functioned as requirements for educational success and entry into high status occupations. Collins used historical data to show how nineteenth-century Protestant elites, threatened by the rising political and economic power of immigrants and the lower classes, found protection in an educational and occupational system which restricted access to high status occupations to those who could afford the necessary educational certification and who demonstrated the high status cultural attributes favored by schools. DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) explain the process by which the elite culture Collins describes was transformed and codified by the educational system (and thus, made a part of the entrance system of high status occupations) as the replacement of 'status-group' membership by cultural capital. The concept of status groups, taken from Weber, refers to "tightly bound collectivities tending toward monopolistic closure of material and cultural opportunities through rules governing ownership of property, occupancy of jobs, marital choice, and social interaction" (ibid.: 1234-1235). Such groups require in particular repeated and exclusive interaction between individuals whose elite membership status is well (and locally) defined. As DiMaggio and Mohr explain, in a rapidly changing economy, status-group membership becomes more fluid, extended networks increasingly replace well-defined sites of interaction, and the means of status acquisition are less fully monopolized. Thus the identification of status-group members and the process of socialization and maintenance of group cohesion becomes more problematic. In the United States, as corporatization in the business sector increased during the past century, it became necessary for business elites to recruit the labor and capital of groups with cultural styles different from the traditional elite styles. This situation produced two outcomes: on the one hand, it eroded the monopoly of legitimation enjoyed by the traditional elite culture as fluency in various cultural styles became profitable. More precisely, as corporate affiliation replaced status group membership as a means of access to resources, fluency in local elite culture became less important. However, to the extent that a general, traditional elite culture had been incorporated into the formal education system, which as a system of credentialization provides access to corporate and professional positions, and as access to higher education spread, fluency in traditional elite cultural styles (divorced from the context of local status groups,) increased in usefulness for network access even as local status groups disintegrated. Thus the possession of cultural capital became a more proximate source of elite network access than local status group membership. While the institutionalization of elite culture by the educational system made recognition of its legitimacy more widespread, it also presented a challenge to elites' power of exclusion. To the extent that cultural capital is not solely acquired through early socialization experiences in the family, but may also be acquired through instruc-
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tion provided by the school, the ability of a single, tightly-bounded, high status cultural group to enjoy privileged access to resources is limited. Bourdieu and others have argued that schools serve only to certify the superiority of students who have already gained, through socialization experiences provided by their families, the cultural orientation necessary to succeed in school. However, as the following analysis will show, with regard at least to the indicators of positive orientation toward high status culture traditionally used by sociologists to denote cultural capital possession, school-based exposure does have a significant positive effect on adult orientation to high status culture, independent of measures of family influence.
3. Data and m e a s u r e s
My analysis of the relative influence of family and school on cultural orientation is based on data provided through the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The SPPA has been administered periodically by the U.S. Census Bureau, under contract to the National Endowment for the Arts. It includes questions about subjects' demographic characteristics, their parents' level of education, and their participation in and consumption of a number of art-related and other activities. Twelve-thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six people responded to the survey. Approximately half of these were asked a series of questions about parents' education and lesson-taking and thus are included in my analysis. Although the SPPA has been administered twice before, in 1982 and 1985, the 1992 Survey is unique in its inclusion of questions about subjects' arts lesson taking which distinguish between lessons taken in and outside of school and which ask for the age at which lessons were taken. I use the 1992 SPPA data first to estimate predictors of museum attendance, which has a history of use by researchers as an indicator of the possession of cultural capital. Bourdieu (1977) favors museum attendance above all other indicators of fine arts participation because of the lack of economic obstacles involved in museum attendance as compared to attendance at concerts or the theater. In the following analysis, museum attendance is operationalized as a dichotomous variable which is assigned a value of one if the subject reports having visited an art museum or gallery one or more times in the past twelve months, and zero if the subject reports no attendance over the same period. Although the SPPA allows respondents to specify the number of times they have attended, I chose to collapse museum attendance into a yes/no, attended/never attended variable, given the size of the total number of attenders. Only about 26% of the subjects reported having visited an art museum or gallery at least once in the past year, making attenders at any level of frequency a relatively distinct group. Repeat visitors (those who had attended more than once) made up only 16% of the total sample. In addition to the regression of museum attendance, I also calculate a model which estimates the probability of attendance at the elite performing arts. This second regression is run as a test of the generalizability of the predictors of museum attendance to other indicators of cultural capital possession. Again a dichotomous dependent
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variable is used, which indicates whether or not a subject reports having attended a ballet, opera, or classical music concert in the past twelve months. This variable equals one if the subject reports having attended any one or more of the three events indicated, and zero if the subject indicates no such attendance. Here I follow DiMaggio and Useem (1978), who measure fine arts participation by attendance at art museums, opera, ballet, theater and classical-music concerts. The 1992 SPPA asks respondents to report on their attendance at opera, ballet, classical music, jazz, and modem dance performances, and at productions of musicals and plays. I chose opera, ballet, and classical music concerts because of their relatively unproblematic identification as high status arts (all three exclude elementary or high school performances) as compared to musicals and plays, the status of which varies more widely according to context, and to jazz and modem dance, which do not enjoy the same history of recognition by high-prestige cultural institutions. The models predicting museum attendance and attendance at the elite performing arts include eleven independent variables: subject's education, income, race, gender, age, type of residence, mother's education, father's education, and lesson taking in and outside of school. Subject's education and parent's education are measured in years of education completed. Income is expressed as the natural logarithm of the subject's yearly income in dollars. Race is a dichotomous variable, which takes a value of one if the subject is identified as Black and zero if the subject is identified as White, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Aleut, or Eskimo. t Gender is also a dichotomous variable, which takes a value of one if the subject is female and zero if the subject is male. Age is expressed in years. Type of residence is indicated by means of two dichotomous variables indicating residence in a central city of a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) or residence in an SMSA outside a central city, with residence outside an SMSA as the residual category. Lesson taking in and outside of school is indicated by two separate dichotomous variables. School-based lesson taking is indicated by a dichotomous variable which equals one if the subject reports having taken lessons in school and under the age of eighteen, in any of the following subjects: voice or instrumental music, visual arts, acting or theater, ballet or other dance, creative writing, or music appreciation. If the subject reports having taken lessons in any of these fields under the age of eighteen but outside of school, the dichotomous variable indicating school-based lesson taking will equal zero. This is because the school-based lessons variable is designed to measure the effect of having had arts lessons as a child, but only through the provision of the school. Lesson taking outside of school is indicated by a dichotomous variable which equals one if the subject reports having taken lessons in any one or more of the subjects listed above, outside of school and under the age of eighteen. Thus, in the case of an individual who took a drawing class in school plus private piano lessons, the variable indicating lesson taking in school would equal one, and the variable indicating lesson
n An attempt was made to create a separate category for those whose race was other than Black or White. However, as only about 3% of the total sample and about 3% of the sample used in my analysis falls into this category, Asians, Whites, and others were instead placed in a single category.
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taking outside of school would equal one. The residual category includes those who report no childhood lesson taking, in or outside of school. Treating the information provided on lesson taking in this way allows us to compare the effect of solely school-based art lessons on adult participation in high status cultural activities to that of lessons presumably provided through the special interest and efforts of the family. The importance of lesson taking is seen not in the specific instruction it provides toward a particular skill (for example, that of dancing or painting), but in its ability to provide students with a positive feeling towards the arts in general, similar to the feeling of being 'cultured' which DiMaggio (1982) used as an indicator of cultural capital. If, as Bourdieu's argument suggests, school-based instruction has little or no independent positive effect on the acquisition of cultural capital, the latter being primarily the product of the cultural resources of the family and of the socialization experiences provided through those resources, then one would expect to find no significant correlation between school-based lesson taking and adult demonstrations of cultural capital possession, once family background is controlled. On the other hand, a significant positive effect of purely school-based lesson taking on museum and elite arts-performance attendance would suggest, at least as regards those two indicators of cultural capital possession, that socialization experiences provided by schools are in fact effective to a significant degree at providing access to high status cultural attitudes to students of various cultural backgrounds.
4. Analysis
4. !. Predictors o f museum attendance
Table 1 shows the results of two separate logistic regressions with museum attendance as the dependent variable, with and without the two lessons variables, respectively. Logistic regression is used to estimate the probability that an event will or will not occur (i.e., in analyses in which the dependent variable is dichotomous). 2 Two regressions are run as a means of testing the robustness of the effects of the control variables, which, as the results show, remain quite stable in size and direction of effect, with or without the inclusion of the lessons variables. The effects of the control variables on the probability of museum attendance are generally consistent with those found in earlier analyses of the 1982 and 1985 SPPA's. Subject's education, income, gender, and type of residence all show a significant positive effect on probability of museum attendance, as they did in Schuster's (1991) analysis of the 1985 SPPA. 3 Age had a very small positive effect in Schuster's analysis, 2 This analysis uses SPSS Release 4. I. 3 In a similar logistic regression, Schuster found education, income, age, and city residence to be significant attendance. Gender was significant in his original regression but insignificant when socialization variables (two dichotomous variables indicating visual arts or an history or appreciation lessons taken at any age, and two dichotomous variables indicating childhood visits to an museums with parents) were
predictors of museum included.
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209
Table I Logistic regression models predicting museum attendance Independent variables Education (in years)
B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e.
Income (in natural log) Race ( I = Black, 0 = other) Gender (I = female, 0 = male) Age Central city of an SMSA SMSA, not central city Mother's education Father's education School-based arts lessons only Arts lessons taken outside of school Constant
Without lessons variables
With lessons variables
0.2733 0.0175 0.2940 0.0525 - 0.1458 0.1491 0.2386 0.0762 0.0025 0.0026 0.3064 0.1076 - 0.0432 0.1021 0.1442 0.0207 0.0260 0.0173
0.2647 0.0186 0.2766 0.0558 - 0.0827 0.1573 0.1689 0.0826 0.0033 0.0027 0.3605 0.1145 - 0.0053 0.1083 0.1041 0.0223 0.0224 0.0187 0.5535 0.1029 0.6020 0.0975 - 9.5358 0.6115
*** ***
**
**
*' *
- 9.9456 * * * 0.5709
""" ***
*
**
***
*** * *' ** *
" p < 0.05, two-tailed; * * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * * * p < 0.001, two-tailed. Equation without arts lessons: Number of cases used in analysis = 4158. Model chi-square = 811.296 ( p = 0.0000; df = 9). Equation with arts lessons: Number of cases used in analysis = 3859. Model chi-square = 758.726 ( p = 0.0000; df = 11).
a n d n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t in m y a n a l y s i s . R a c e h a d a s u b s t a n t i a l e f f e c t in S c h u s t e r ' s a n a l y s i s o f t h e 1985 S P P A d a t a , b u t s h o w s n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t in m y a n a l y s i s o f t h e 1992 d a t a . a T h e
difference
in f i n d i n g s t h u s s u g g e s t s t h a t r a c e h a s b e c o m e
a less
effective predictor of cultural capital possession, s Note
that
in
both
models,
mother's
education
has
a
significant
effect
on
the
p r o b a b i l i t y o f t h e s u b j e c t ' s h a v i n g a t t e n d e d a m u s e u m o r art g a l l e r y at l e a s t o n c e in t h e p a s t y e a r , w h i l e f a t h e r ' s e d u c a t i o n h a s n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t . I n the s e c o n d m o d e l , in which
lessons
variables
are
included,
subjects
who
have
mothers
with
a
college
4 However, in an analysis of 1982 and 1985 SPPA data, DiMaggio and Ostrower (1987) noted that the effect of race was very small in comparison to that of education and usually smaller than the effects of income or occupational status. 5 To test for possible interaction effects, I constructed an interaction variable for race and type of residence and a second interaction variable for race and age. I then included the two variables in regressions of museum attendance and performing arts attendance, with and without the lessons variables. Neither was significant in any of the equations.
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K. Kr acman / Poetics" 24 (1996) 203-218
education are 1.52 times more likely to be attenders than those whose mothers have only a high school education, all other characteristics being held constant. 6 There is no significant difference in probabilities of museum attendance for subjects who have fathers of different educational attainment levels. This finding agrees with earlier research on the relative roles of mothers and fathers in the socialization of children. Child development studies, which address the effect of parental inputs on children's acquired skills and behaviors, show that mothers do most of the work of socializing children at home, spending a greater amount of time reading to their children, talking with them, and helping with homework, than do fathers. A frequently-cited study on correlates of educational achievement showed that mothers' levels of education were more strongly correlated with children's school achievement (as measured by a score on the vocabulary subtest of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) than fathers' education, linking this finding to time budget studies which showed that mothers (even those employed outside the home) spent more time in meaningful interaction with their children than did fathers (Murnane et al., 1981). In their analysis of the Project Talent survey, DiMaggio and Mohr found that father's education was more strongly correlated with child's cultural capital than was mother's education. However, they did not conclude from this that fathers play a greater role in the socialization of children than do mothers. Rather, they speculated that mother's cultural capital was being imperfectly captured by mother's level of education, since high status women were likely to marry highly educated men (and to use their cultural capital to perform for the family the task of transforming class into status) rather than furthering their education (DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985; Collins, 1992). One would expect that women's levels of cultural capital would be more closely correlated with their levels of educational achievement in 1992 than in the 1960s, when Project Talent was first administered. Time management studies suggest that women who work outside the home cut down on housekeeping but not on child care; thus one would not expect higher rates of employment among women to affect negatively the relative influence of the mother on the socialization of the child. Further, as recent research shows, mothers' occupational status can actually have a positive effect on children's socialization in high status aspirations and behaviors, as children with professional mothers tend to achieve higher levels of educational attainment than children whose mothers are not employed outside the home (Kalmijn, 1994).
6 In logistic regression analysis, the natural logarithm of the odds ratio (the probability of something occurring divided by the probability of it not occurring) is equal to a linear combination of the independent variables, such that In(p/1 - p) = constant + b 1X 1 + b2X2 +...bnXn. Stated in another way, p / 1 - p = the mathematical constant e taken to the power of (constant+blXI +b2X2+...bnXn). Thus in the case of mother's education, a subject whose mother has 12 years of education is e to the power of 12.0.1041, or 3.49 times more likely to attend a museum than a subject whose mother has 0 years of education. Likewise, a subject whose mother has 16 years of education is e to the power of 16.0.1041, or 5.29 times more likely to attend than a subject whose mother has 0 years of education. Therefore, the subject whose mother has a college education is 5.29/3.49, or 1.52 times more likely to attend a museum than is the subject whose mother has a high school education. For further explanation see Menard (1995:12-13).
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211
The greater impact of mothers' education on children's cultural capital, explained in terms of mothers' traditional childrearing responsibilities, can more generally be traced to the role disproportionately played by women in the use of cultural capital as a signal of status. Women are traditionally identified as the principle bearers of status culture in the home, serving as 'front stage' actors in the presentation of status in the private sphere, and often in their place of employment as well, filling such roles as receptionist, clerk, or beautician (Collins, 1992). The special role of women in the transformation of cultural capital into status distinction is reflected in the stronger correlation of mother's educational attainment with children's cultural habits. The estimated effects of the last two independent variables, which measure the effect of purely school-based arts lessons and lessons taken outside of school, suggest finally that school-based instruction in the arts does in fact have a significant, independent, positive effect on probabilities of adult participation in high status culture. As Table 1 shows, those who had arts lessons only in school are approximately 1.7 times more likely to be museum attenders than are those who had no lessons in the arts as children. By comparison, those who had lessons outside of school are about 1.8 times more likely to be museum attenders than are those who had no formal arts instruction at all. Thus, while subjects who were provided with childhood lessons in the arts outside of school are slightly more likely to be adult museum attenders than those who received arts instruction only in school, the strong independent effect of school-based arts instruction on adult museum attendance suggests that school-based instruction can in fact promote the acquisition of high-status cultural attitudes, such that differences in initial cultural resources brought to the school by students may actually be lessened and not simply intensified.
4.2. Predictors of elite performing-arts attendance To test the appropriateness of using the predictors of museum attendance to predict high status arts participation more generally, and simultaneously to discover possible differences in the correlates of different indicators of cultural capital possession, I next calculate two logistic regression equations which estimate the probability of elite performing-arts attendance, These equations use the same independent variables as those employed in the museum attendance equation. As Table 2 shows, school-based arts lesson taking has a significant independent effect on elite performing-arts attendance, although the difference in sizes of effect of purely school-based lesson taking versus lesson taking outside of school is larger for performing arts attendance than for museum attendance. Subjects who had exclusively school-based arts instruction as children are about one and one-half times more likely to report having attended an opera, ballet, or classical music concert than are subjects who had no instruction, whereas subjects who had arts lessons outside of school are about twice as likely to be attenders. The larger effect of school-based lessons on museum attendance, and of outside-ofschool lessons on elite performing-arts attendance, may be attributed in part to correspondence between the field in which lessons were taken and the event being attended. As Orend (1988) noted in his analysis of the 1982 SPPA, childhood lessons in
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Table 2 Logistic regression models predicting elite performing-arts attendance Independent variables
Without lessons variables
With lessons variables
Education (in years)
B
0.2409 * * *
0.2170
0.0200 0.2837 * ° *
0.0216
Income (in natural log)
s.e. B s.c.
0.0625
0.0685 -0.5204
s.e. B
0.2011 0.3959 * '
0.2180 0.2607
0.0895 0.0179 * ' 0.0029 0.7660 * *
0.0987 0.0184 0.0032
Central city o f an S M S A
s.e. B s.e. B
SMSA, not central city
s.c. B
0.1352 0.3920 '
B
G e n d e r ( i = female, 0 = m a l e ) Age
Mother's education Father's education School-based arts lessons only Arts lessons taken outside o f school Constant
s.e.
0.1310
B s.e. B s.e.
0.0853 * ° 0.0235 0.0676 ° * 0.0194
B s.e. B s.e. B s.c.
0
0.3302
-0.5609 * "
Race (I = Black, 0 = other)
¢
S
0.8732 0.1471 0.4122 0.1425 0.0527 0.0258 0.0596 0.0213 0.3754 0.1281 0.7158
- I 1.0619 * ° ° 0.6768
0.1135 - 11.1245 0.7474
" p < 0.05, two-tailed; ' * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * * " p < 0.001, two-tailed. Equation without arts lessons: N u m b e r of cases used in analysis = 4158. Model c h i - s q u a r e = 566.214 ( p = 0.0000; d f = 9). Equation with arts lessons: N u m b e r of cases used in analysis = 3859. Model chi-square = 541.323 (p = 0.0000; d f = II).
performance have an especially strong association with adult attendance rates. In the 1992 SPPA, for which the effects of school-based and outside-of-school lesson taking on museum attendance are nearly equal, the percentage of students (14 percent) in the school-based lesson category who had taken lessons in the visual arts (not art appreciation, but actual creation) is comparable to the percentage of students in the outside-ofschool lesson category who had taken visual-arts lessons (20 percent). In the case of performing arts attendance, on which the effect of lesson taking outside of school is almost twice as large as the effect of school-based lesson taking, 93 percent of subjects in the outside-of-school lesson category had taken lessons in ballet, instrumental or vocal music performance, whereas only 71 percent of those in the school-based lesson category had taken lessons in those fields. Thus, some of the difference in the effect of school-based lessons versus lessons taken outside of school on elite performing-arts attendance may be attributed to different degrees of correspondence between the subject of the lessons and the type of event being attended. However, given the difference between the effects of the other independent variables on museum attendance, compared to their effects on elite performing-arts attendance,
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213
some of the strength of the correlation of outside-of-school lesson taking with elite performing-arts attendance might also be attributed to the fact that ascriptive characteristics generally have a stronger effect on elite performing-arts attendance than on museum attendance. Income, race, type of residence, and lesson taking outside of school all have stronger effects on performing-arts attendance than on museum attendance. The regression results suggest that elite performing-arts attendance is a pastime in which wealthy, White, urban women whose childhood socialization included lessons in the performance arts provided through the initiative of their parents are particularly likely to participate. Whereas in museum-attendance model 2, women are 1.18 times more likely to be attenders than are men, in the second model of performing-arts attendance, women are 1.30 times more likely to be attenders than are men. This particularly strong association between being female and attending high status arts performances, given the strong correlation of the latter with income, race, and lesson taking outside of school, reinforces Mohr and DiMaggio's (1996) argument with regard to Project Talent data, that whereas for boys, cultural capital serves as a means of mobility, for girls it serves as part of a prescribed high status culture. Notwithstanding the stronger effects of income, race, and gender on elite performing-arts attendance, and even the lesser responsiveness of the latter to educational attainment, school-based lesson taking still shows an independent, positive effect on the probability of performing-arts attendance, just as it did in the museum attendance models. Those who had arts instruction solely in school are about 1.5 times more likely to report attendance at the elite performing arts, and 1.7 times more likely to report attendance at museums, than are those who had no lessons. This does not indicate, however, those characteristics which would make the subject more or less likely to take advantage of or have access to school-based instruction in the arts. To answer this question, it is necessary to perform an additional analysis, this time estimating the probability of taking arts lessons in school, given the subject's childhood characteristics.
4.3. Predictors of lesson taking Table 3 shows the results of a logistic regression model which estimates the probability of the subject's having taken exclusively school-based arts lessons, given his or her gender, race, current age (not the age at which lessons were taken, but the present age of the adult subject), and parents' education. In this model, the variable representing school-based lesson taking equals one if the subject reports having taken arts lessons in school as a child, and zero if the subject reports never having taken arts lessons as a child. Unlike in the previous equations, subjects who have taken lessons outside of school are treated as missing cases and excluded from the analysis. This is done so that the model may be understood to compare the characteristics of those who have never had arts lessons to the characteristics of those who have had arts lessons in school, just as the regression of lesson taking outside of school (also shown in Table 3) compares those who have never had arts lessons outside of school to those who have. If, in the school-based lessons model, those who had taken lessons outside of school were included in the analysis, then one would have instead a comparison of those who had
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Table 3 Logistic regression models predicting lesson taking Independent variables Race (1 = Black, 0 = other) Gender ( I = female. 0 = male) Age Mother's education Father's education Constant
B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.c. B s.e. B s.e.
In school only
Outside of school
-0.4316 0.1518 0.1758 0.0848 - 0.0204 0.0029 0.1280 0.0247 0.0843 0.0207 - 2.5995 0.3103
-0.6337 0.1600 0.8311 0.0780 0.0143 0.0024 0.1899 0.0208 0.1360 0.0172 -5.9361 0.2855
S
J
* p < 0.05, two-tailed; * * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * ° * p < 0.001, two-tailed. Regression of school-based lesson taking: Number of cases used in analysis = 311 I. Model chi-square = 236.495 ( p = 0.0000; df = 5). Regression of lesson taking outside of school: Number of cases used in analysis = 4217. Model chi-square = 492.113 ( p = 0.00190; df = 5).
taken e x c l u s i v e l y s c h o o l - b a s e d lessons with those w h o had n e v e r taken lessons a n d with those w h o had taken lessons both in and outside o f school. It is clear f r o m the regression results that the probability o f taking c h i l d h o o d arts lessons, in or outside o f school, is strongly affected by race, gender, and f a m i l y b a c k g r o u n d (as indicated by p a r e n t ' s education). A g e also has a slight effect, suggesting, as w o u l d be e x p e c t e d , that school-based arts instruction is m o r e c o m m o n in the recent than in the m o r e distant past, and that lesson taking outside o f school is slightly less c o m m o n a m o n g y o u n g e r generations than a m o n g older generations. H o w e v e r , it is also e v i d e n t that the effects o f race, gender, and parents' e d u c a t i o n are consistently l o w e r for school-based lesson taking than for lesson taking outside o f school. T h i s is especially true o f the effect o f gender. W h i l e w o m e n are 2.30 times m o r e likely to h a v e taken lessons outside o f school than are boys, they are only 1.19 t i m e s m o r e likely to h a v e taken s c h o o l - b a s e d lessons. 7 H e r e again, the strong association b e t w e e n b e i n g f e m a l e and r e c e i v i n g instruction in the arts which is supplemental to that p r o v i d e d in the school, like the strong association o f f e m a l e g e n d e r and performing-arts attendance, supports the a r g u m e n t that for w o m e n especially, participation in the arts is part o f a prescribed status culture. The lesser predictability of s c h o o l - b a s e d lesson taking by gender, race, and parents' education suggests that arts instruction p r o v i d e d by the schools m a y p r o v i d e an alternative w a y for children with smaller inheritances o f cultural capital to gain e x p o s u r e
7 Again, the calculation of probabilities of school-based lesson taking is based on a comparison of those who have had arts instruction only in school with those who have had no arts instruction. Subjects who have had arts instruction both in and outside of school are excluded from consideration. To include the latter group would be to risk picking up those characteristics which are predictive of taking lessons outside of school.
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
215
to and familiarity with the arts. This exposure in turn has a positive influence on subjects' orientation toward high status cultural behavior as adults, as indicated by the effect of school-based lesson taking on probabilities of attendance at museums and the elite performing arts.
5. Conclusion Analysis of the results of the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts demonstrates that arts instruction provided by the schools does have a significant independent effect on adult participation in the high status arts, independent of measures of family influence such as parents' education and lesson taking outside of school. And while the probability that a child will receive instruction in the arts in school is determined in part by ascriptive characteristics such as race and parents' education, these characteristics have a much smaller effect on the probability of receiving school-based arts instruction than on the probability of receiving instruction outside of school. School-based arts instruction has a significant effect on adult participation in the high status arts, and especially on museum attendance, for which the effect of lessons taken in school is almost identical to that of lessons taken outside of school. The effect of school-based arts instruction is even comparable to that of parents' education, as illustrated by the finding that, while subjects with college-educated mothers are 1.52 times more likely to be museum attenders than are subjects whose mothers received only a high school education, subjects who as children received formal training in the arts exclusively through the school are !.7 times more likely to attend museums than are those who received no formal arts training. Thus, the provision of arts instruction by the school does appear to have an important effect on attitudes toward high status cultural practices for individuals with no other source of formal arts instruction and with parents of varying levels of educational attainment. The findings suggest that family background, while predictive of adult cultural practices, is tempered in its affect by socialization experiences which occur outside the family. Schools, then, which serve on the one hand to increase the range of recognition of the legitimacy of high status culture, may also serve to lessen initial differences in cultural resources among students, thus making the acquisition and exercise of cultural capital more generally attainable.
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K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
Appendix A: Means and standard deviations of variables used in the models Variable
Mean
Standard Deviation
N
Years of education Income (dollars) Race: Black Gender: female Age Central city of an SMSA SMSA, not central city Mother's education Father's education Museum attendance Performing-arts attendance Ballet Opera Classical music concert Lessons taken only in school Lessons taken outside of school
12.87 33,898 0. I 0 0.56 45.5 0.33 0.45 11.47 11.59 0.26
3.05 25,260 0.30 0.50 17.57 0.47 0.50 2.3 I 2.72 0.44
12,672 11,624 12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 4906 4666 12,736
0.16 0.05 0.03 0.13 0.18 0.24
0.37 0.21 0.18 0.33 0.38 0.42
12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 5591 5345
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
217
I
-666o
~ . ~ --ddodd
- d d d d d d I
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o o o o o o d d d d d d
--dddddodd
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I I I [ I I I
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- 6 6 6 6 d 6 d 6 d i i i i
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218
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
References Andreasen, Alan R., 1991. Expanding the audience for the performing arts. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In: Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey (eds.), Power and ideology in education, 487-51 I. New York: Oxford. Collins, Randall, 1979. The credential society. New York: Academic Press. Collins, Randall, 1992. Women and the producation of status cultures. In: M. Lamont and M. Fournier (eds.), Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality, 213-231. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, Paul, 1982. Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status culture participation on the grades of U.S. high school students. American Sociological Review 47, 189-201. DiMaggio, Paul and John Mohr, 1985. Cultural capital, educational attainment, and marital selection. American Journal of Sociology 90, 1231 - 1261. DiMaggio, Paul and Francie Ostrower, 1992. Race, ethnicity, and participation in the arts. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. DiMaggio, Paul and Michael Useem, 1978. Social class and arts consumption. Theory and Society 5, 141-161. Kalmijn, Matthijs, 1994. Mother's occupational status and children's schooling. American Sociological Review 59, 257-275. Menard, Scott, 1995. Applied logistic regression analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mohr, John and Paul DiMaggio, 1996. The intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. In: Michael Wallace (ed.), Research in social stratification and mobility. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Murnane, Richard J., Rebecca A. Maynard and James C. Ohls, 1981. Home resources and children's achievement. Review of Economics and Statistics 63, 369-377. Orend, Richard J., 1989. Socialization and participation in the arts. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Schuster, J. Mark Davidson, 1991. The audience for American art museums. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press.
Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
The effect of school-based arts instruction on attendance at museums and the performing arts Kimberly Kracman Department of Sociology, 2-N-2 Green Hall, Princeton Unioersity, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Abstract
In this essay, I use new data from the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts to show that arts instruction provided solely through the school has a significant positive effect on adult participation in the high status arts, independent of measures of family background. I construct two logistic regression analyses which estimate separately the effects of childhood arts lesson taking in and outside of school on attendance at art museums and the elite performing arts, when parents' education and subject's gender, race, age, type of residence, income, and education are held constant. I also construct two separate logistic regression analyses which estimate the effects on school-based lesson taking and lesson taking outside of school of parents' education, gender, race, and age. My findings suggest that the schools' provision of exposure to the arts has a significant effect on students' long-term cultural orientation, independent of measures of family influence.
1. Introduction
Recognition of the importance of cultural capital for the maintenance of stratification systems has generated interest in identifying the mechanism by which fluency in prestigious cultural styles is acquired (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978; Mohr and DiMaggio, 1996). Of particular interest is the relative influence of families and schools on children's socialization. Schools are supposed to provide the cognitive tools necessary for students to make the most of their abilities, thus serving to reduce differences in life chances which arise from differences in family resources. Bourdieu (1977) argues, however, that in reality success in school is predetermined by the cultural resources of the family, such that schools function primarily to certify and legitimate the continued high status of children from high status families, and to explain the lesser educational and, ultimately, occupational attainment of children who enter school with less exposure to the high status cultural styles which schools favor. 0304-422X/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII S 0 3 0 4 - 4 2 2 X ( 9 6 ) 0 0 0 0 9 - 5
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If the school's primary effect is to certify as superior those cultural styles already practiced by students from high status families, then one would expect school-based instruction nominally designed to provide first-time exposure to high status cultural objects and practices to be largely ineffective in altering students' long-term cultural orientation (except perhaps for the occasional instance of mobility, which Bourdieu argues is required for the maintenance of the education system's reputation as an agent of meritocracy). One would expect, on the other hand, to find a very strong, even exclusive, correlation between cultural orientation and family-based inputs. In the following analysis, I use data provided by the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) to estimate the relative effects of school and family-based inputs on individuals' orientation toward institutionally certified high status culture, as indicated by attendance at museums and the high status performing arts. My analysis uses information newly provided by the 1992 SPPA on the source of arts instruction (in school or outside of school) and the age at which lessons were taken, as well as information on mother's and father's educational attainment and various demographic characteristics. From these new data, I construct two logistic regression analyses which estimate the effects of arts education - both taking arts lessons outside of school and taking lessons only in school - on orientation to institutionally certified high status culture, as indicated by reported attendance at art museums and the performing arts. Parents' educational attainment and subject's educational attainment, income, race, gender, age, and type of residence serve as control variables in the models. I also construct two logistic regression equations which estimate the effects on school-based lesson taking and lesson taking outside of school of parents' education and subject's gender, race, and age. If solely school-based instruction in the arts has a negligible effect on adult orientation toward high status cultural practices, then one would expect to find little or no association between school-based instruction in the arts and reported attendance at museums and the performing arts, once family background is controlled. One would alternatively expect to find significant correlations between lessons taken outside of school and adult participation in the fine arts, inasmuch as such lessons reflect the special interest and efforts of the individual's parents in providing for the child's socialization in the arts. If, however, subjects who received childhood instruction in the arts solely through the schools are found, as adults, to attend museums and high-prestige performing arts events (practices which Bourdieu and others specify as indicators of the possession of cultural capital) at significantly higher rates than otherwise comparable subjects who had no childhood arts instruction, then new evidence will exist for the ability of the schools (at least, in the United States) to provide those students who have received small inheritances of cultural capital with a site for socialization into high status cultural practices.
2. Defining high status culture: The meaning of 'cultural capital' 'Cultural capital' represents the ability to communicate fluently those cultural styles which are certified as superior by institutions of cultural authority and recognized as
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legitimate at the societal level. Sociologists of culture and education have demonstrated the importance of cultural capital for entrance into higher levels of educational and occupational attainment (Bourdieu, 1977; see DiMaggio, this issue, for a review). DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) used longitudinal data from the Project Talent Survey to show how cultural capital (operationalized as a composite of interest in, performance of, and attendance at fine arts events, and self-recognition as a 'cultured person') is positively correlated with educational and occupational attainment. Similarly, Randall Collins (1979) has argued that high status cultural attributes have historically functioned as requirements for educational success and entry into high status occupations. Collins used historical data to show how nineteenth-century Protestant elites, threatened by the rising political and economic power of immigrants and the lower classes, found protection in an educational and occupational system which restricted access to high status occupations to those who could afford the necessary educational certification and who demonstrated the high status cultural attributes favored by schools. DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) explain the process by which the elite culture Collins describes was transformed and codified by the educational system (and thus, made a part of the entrance system of high status occupations) as the replacement of 'status-group' membership by cultural capital. The concept of status groups, taken from Weber, refers to "tightly bound collectivities tending toward monopolistic closure of material and cultural opportunities through rules governing ownership of property, occupancy of jobs, marital choice, and social interaction" (ibid.: 1234-1235). Such groups require in particular repeated and exclusive interaction between individuals whose elite membership status is well (and locally) defined. As DiMaggio and Mohr explain, in a rapidly changing economy, status-group membership becomes more fluid, extended networks increasingly replace well-defined sites of interaction, and the means of status acquisition are less fully monopolized. Thus the identification of status-group members and the process of socialization and maintenance of group cohesion becomes more problematic. In the United States, as corporatization in the business sector increased during the past century, it became necessary for business elites to recruit the labor and capital of groups with cultural styles different from the traditional elite styles. This situation produced two outcomes: on the one hand, it eroded the monopoly of legitimation enjoyed by the traditional elite culture as fluency in various cultural styles became profitable. More precisely, as corporate affiliation replaced status group membership as a means of access to resources, fluency in local elite culture became less important. However, to the extent that a general, traditional elite culture had been incorporated into the formal education system, which as a system of credentialization provides access to corporate and professional positions, and as access to higher education spread, fluency in traditional elite cultural styles (divorced from the context of local status groups,) increased in usefulness for network access even as local status groups disintegrated. Thus the possession of cultural capital became a more proximate source of elite network access than local status group membership. While the institutionalization of elite culture by the educational system made recognition of its legitimacy more widespread, it also presented a challenge to elites' power of exclusion. To the extent that cultural capital is not solely acquired through early socialization experiences in the family, but may also be acquired through instruc-
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tion provided by the school, the ability of a single, tightly-bounded, high status cultural group to enjoy privileged access to resources is limited. Bourdieu and others have argued that schools serve only to certify the superiority of students who have already gained, through socialization experiences provided by their families, the cultural orientation necessary to succeed in school. However, as the following analysis will show, with regard at least to the indicators of positive orientation toward high status culture traditionally used by sociologists to denote cultural capital possession, school-based exposure does have a significant positive effect on adult orientation to high status culture, independent of measures of family influence.
3. Data and m e a s u r e s
My analysis of the relative influence of family and school on cultural orientation is based on data provided through the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The SPPA has been administered periodically by the U.S. Census Bureau, under contract to the National Endowment for the Arts. It includes questions about subjects' demographic characteristics, their parents' level of education, and their participation in and consumption of a number of art-related and other activities. Twelve-thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six people responded to the survey. Approximately half of these were asked a series of questions about parents' education and lesson-taking and thus are included in my analysis. Although the SPPA has been administered twice before, in 1982 and 1985, the 1992 Survey is unique in its inclusion of questions about subjects' arts lesson taking which distinguish between lessons taken in and outside of school and which ask for the age at which lessons were taken. I use the 1992 SPPA data first to estimate predictors of museum attendance, which has a history of use by researchers as an indicator of the possession of cultural capital. Bourdieu (1977) favors museum attendance above all other indicators of fine arts participation because of the lack of economic obstacles involved in museum attendance as compared to attendance at concerts or the theater. In the following analysis, museum attendance is operationalized as a dichotomous variable which is assigned a value of one if the subject reports having visited an art museum or gallery one or more times in the past twelve months, and zero if the subject reports no attendance over the same period. Although the SPPA allows respondents to specify the number of times they have attended, I chose to collapse museum attendance into a yes/no, attended/never attended variable, given the size of the total number of attenders. Only about 26% of the subjects reported having visited an art museum or gallery at least once in the past year, making attenders at any level of frequency a relatively distinct group. Repeat visitors (those who had attended more than once) made up only 16% of the total sample. In addition to the regression of museum attendance, I also calculate a model which estimates the probability of attendance at the elite performing arts. This second regression is run as a test of the generalizability of the predictors of museum attendance to other indicators of cultural capital possession. Again a dichotomous dependent
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variable is used, which indicates whether or not a subject reports having attended a ballet, opera, or classical music concert in the past twelve months. This variable equals one if the subject reports having attended any one or more of the three events indicated, and zero if the subject indicates no such attendance. Here I follow DiMaggio and Useem (1978), who measure fine arts participation by attendance at art museums, opera, ballet, theater and classical-music concerts. The 1992 SPPA asks respondents to report on their attendance at opera, ballet, classical music, jazz, and modem dance performances, and at productions of musicals and plays. I chose opera, ballet, and classical music concerts because of their relatively unproblematic identification as high status arts (all three exclude elementary or high school performances) as compared to musicals and plays, the status of which varies more widely according to context, and to jazz and modem dance, which do not enjoy the same history of recognition by high-prestige cultural institutions. The models predicting museum attendance and attendance at the elite performing arts include eleven independent variables: subject's education, income, race, gender, age, type of residence, mother's education, father's education, and lesson taking in and outside of school. Subject's education and parent's education are measured in years of education completed. Income is expressed as the natural logarithm of the subject's yearly income in dollars. Race is a dichotomous variable, which takes a value of one if the subject is identified as Black and zero if the subject is identified as White, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Aleut, or Eskimo. t Gender is also a dichotomous variable, which takes a value of one if the subject is female and zero if the subject is male. Age is expressed in years. Type of residence is indicated by means of two dichotomous variables indicating residence in a central city of a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) or residence in an SMSA outside a central city, with residence outside an SMSA as the residual category. Lesson taking in and outside of school is indicated by two separate dichotomous variables. School-based lesson taking is indicated by a dichotomous variable which equals one if the subject reports having taken lessons in school and under the age of eighteen, in any of the following subjects: voice or instrumental music, visual arts, acting or theater, ballet or other dance, creative writing, or music appreciation. If the subject reports having taken lessons in any of these fields under the age of eighteen but outside of school, the dichotomous variable indicating school-based lesson taking will equal zero. This is because the school-based lessons variable is designed to measure the effect of having had arts lessons as a child, but only through the provision of the school. Lesson taking outside of school is indicated by a dichotomous variable which equals one if the subject reports having taken lessons in any one or more of the subjects listed above, outside of school and under the age of eighteen. Thus, in the case of an individual who took a drawing class in school plus private piano lessons, the variable indicating lesson taking in school would equal one, and the variable indicating lesson
n An attempt was made to create a separate category for those whose race was other than Black or White. However, as only about 3% of the total sample and about 3% of the sample used in my analysis falls into this category, Asians, Whites, and others were instead placed in a single category.
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taking outside of school would equal one. The residual category includes those who report no childhood lesson taking, in or outside of school. Treating the information provided on lesson taking in this way allows us to compare the effect of solely school-based art lessons on adult participation in high status cultural activities to that of lessons presumably provided through the special interest and efforts of the family. The importance of lesson taking is seen not in the specific instruction it provides toward a particular skill (for example, that of dancing or painting), but in its ability to provide students with a positive feeling towards the arts in general, similar to the feeling of being 'cultured' which DiMaggio (1982) used as an indicator of cultural capital. If, as Bourdieu's argument suggests, school-based instruction has little or no independent positive effect on the acquisition of cultural capital, the latter being primarily the product of the cultural resources of the family and of the socialization experiences provided through those resources, then one would expect to find no significant correlation between school-based lesson taking and adult demonstrations of cultural capital possession, once family background is controlled. On the other hand, a significant positive effect of purely school-based lesson taking on museum and elite arts-performance attendance would suggest, at least as regards those two indicators of cultural capital possession, that socialization experiences provided by schools are in fact effective to a significant degree at providing access to high status cultural attitudes to students of various cultural backgrounds.
4. Analysis
4. !. Predictors o f museum attendance
Table 1 shows the results of two separate logistic regressions with museum attendance as the dependent variable, with and without the two lessons variables, respectively. Logistic regression is used to estimate the probability that an event will or will not occur (i.e., in analyses in which the dependent variable is dichotomous). 2 Two regressions are run as a means of testing the robustness of the effects of the control variables, which, as the results show, remain quite stable in size and direction of effect, with or without the inclusion of the lessons variables. The effects of the control variables on the probability of museum attendance are generally consistent with those found in earlier analyses of the 1982 and 1985 SPPA's. Subject's education, income, gender, and type of residence all show a significant positive effect on probability of museum attendance, as they did in Schuster's (1991) analysis of the 1985 SPPA. 3 Age had a very small positive effect in Schuster's analysis, 2 This analysis uses SPSS Release 4. I. 3 In a similar logistic regression, Schuster found education, income, age, and city residence to be significant attendance. Gender was significant in his original regression but insignificant when socialization variables (two dichotomous variables indicating visual arts or an history or appreciation lessons taken at any age, and two dichotomous variables indicating childhood visits to an museums with parents) were
predictors of museum included.
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209
Table I Logistic regression models predicting museum attendance Independent variables Education (in years)
B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.e.
Income (in natural log) Race ( I = Black, 0 = other) Gender (I = female, 0 = male) Age Central city of an SMSA SMSA, not central city Mother's education Father's education School-based arts lessons only Arts lessons taken outside of school Constant
Without lessons variables
With lessons variables
0.2733 0.0175 0.2940 0.0525 - 0.1458 0.1491 0.2386 0.0762 0.0025 0.0026 0.3064 0.1076 - 0.0432 0.1021 0.1442 0.0207 0.0260 0.0173
0.2647 0.0186 0.2766 0.0558 - 0.0827 0.1573 0.1689 0.0826 0.0033 0.0027 0.3605 0.1145 - 0.0053 0.1083 0.1041 0.0223 0.0224 0.0187 0.5535 0.1029 0.6020 0.0975 - 9.5358 0.6115
*** ***
**
**
*' *
- 9.9456 * * * 0.5709
""" ***
*
**
***
*** * *' ** *
" p < 0.05, two-tailed; * * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * * * p < 0.001, two-tailed. Equation without arts lessons: Number of cases used in analysis = 4158. Model chi-square = 811.296 ( p = 0.0000; df = 9). Equation with arts lessons: Number of cases used in analysis = 3859. Model chi-square = 758.726 ( p = 0.0000; df = 11).
a n d n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t in m y a n a l y s i s . R a c e h a d a s u b s t a n t i a l e f f e c t in S c h u s t e r ' s a n a l y s i s o f t h e 1985 S P P A d a t a , b u t s h o w s n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t in m y a n a l y s i s o f t h e 1992 d a t a . a T h e
difference
in f i n d i n g s t h u s s u g g e s t s t h a t r a c e h a s b e c o m e
a less
effective predictor of cultural capital possession, s Note
that
in
both
models,
mother's
education
has
a
significant
effect
on
the
p r o b a b i l i t y o f t h e s u b j e c t ' s h a v i n g a t t e n d e d a m u s e u m o r art g a l l e r y at l e a s t o n c e in t h e p a s t y e a r , w h i l e f a t h e r ' s e d u c a t i o n h a s n o s i g n i f i c a n t e f f e c t . I n the s e c o n d m o d e l , in which
lessons
variables
are
included,
subjects
who
have
mothers
with
a
college
4 However, in an analysis of 1982 and 1985 SPPA data, DiMaggio and Ostrower (1987) noted that the effect of race was very small in comparison to that of education and usually smaller than the effects of income or occupational status. 5 To test for possible interaction effects, I constructed an interaction variable for race and type of residence and a second interaction variable for race and age. I then included the two variables in regressions of museum attendance and performing arts attendance, with and without the lessons variables. Neither was significant in any of the equations.
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education are 1.52 times more likely to be attenders than those whose mothers have only a high school education, all other characteristics being held constant. 6 There is no significant difference in probabilities of museum attendance for subjects who have fathers of different educational attainment levels. This finding agrees with earlier research on the relative roles of mothers and fathers in the socialization of children. Child development studies, which address the effect of parental inputs on children's acquired skills and behaviors, show that mothers do most of the work of socializing children at home, spending a greater amount of time reading to their children, talking with them, and helping with homework, than do fathers. A frequently-cited study on correlates of educational achievement showed that mothers' levels of education were more strongly correlated with children's school achievement (as measured by a score on the vocabulary subtest of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) than fathers' education, linking this finding to time budget studies which showed that mothers (even those employed outside the home) spent more time in meaningful interaction with their children than did fathers (Murnane et al., 1981). In their analysis of the Project Talent survey, DiMaggio and Mohr found that father's education was more strongly correlated with child's cultural capital than was mother's education. However, they did not conclude from this that fathers play a greater role in the socialization of children than do mothers. Rather, they speculated that mother's cultural capital was being imperfectly captured by mother's level of education, since high status women were likely to marry highly educated men (and to use their cultural capital to perform for the family the task of transforming class into status) rather than furthering their education (DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985; Collins, 1992). One would expect that women's levels of cultural capital would be more closely correlated with their levels of educational achievement in 1992 than in the 1960s, when Project Talent was first administered. Time management studies suggest that women who work outside the home cut down on housekeeping but not on child care; thus one would not expect higher rates of employment among women to affect negatively the relative influence of the mother on the socialization of the child. Further, as recent research shows, mothers' occupational status can actually have a positive effect on children's socialization in high status aspirations and behaviors, as children with professional mothers tend to achieve higher levels of educational attainment than children whose mothers are not employed outside the home (Kalmijn, 1994).
6 In logistic regression analysis, the natural logarithm of the odds ratio (the probability of something occurring divided by the probability of it not occurring) is equal to a linear combination of the independent variables, such that In(p/1 - p) = constant + b 1X 1 + b2X2 +...bnXn. Stated in another way, p / 1 - p = the mathematical constant e taken to the power of (constant+blXI +b2X2+...bnXn). Thus in the case of mother's education, a subject whose mother has 12 years of education is e to the power of 12.0.1041, or 3.49 times more likely to attend a museum than a subject whose mother has 0 years of education. Likewise, a subject whose mother has 16 years of education is e to the power of 16.0.1041, or 5.29 times more likely to attend than a subject whose mother has 0 years of education. Therefore, the subject whose mother has a college education is 5.29/3.49, or 1.52 times more likely to attend a museum than is the subject whose mother has a high school education. For further explanation see Menard (1995:12-13).
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211
The greater impact of mothers' education on children's cultural capital, explained in terms of mothers' traditional childrearing responsibilities, can more generally be traced to the role disproportionately played by women in the use of cultural capital as a signal of status. Women are traditionally identified as the principle bearers of status culture in the home, serving as 'front stage' actors in the presentation of status in the private sphere, and often in their place of employment as well, filling such roles as receptionist, clerk, or beautician (Collins, 1992). The special role of women in the transformation of cultural capital into status distinction is reflected in the stronger correlation of mother's educational attainment with children's cultural habits. The estimated effects of the last two independent variables, which measure the effect of purely school-based arts lessons and lessons taken outside of school, suggest finally that school-based instruction in the arts does in fact have a significant, independent, positive effect on probabilities of adult participation in high status culture. As Table 1 shows, those who had arts lessons only in school are approximately 1.7 times more likely to be museum attenders than are those who had no lessons in the arts as children. By comparison, those who had lessons outside of school are about 1.8 times more likely to be museum attenders than are those who had no formal arts instruction at all. Thus, while subjects who were provided with childhood lessons in the arts outside of school are slightly more likely to be adult museum attenders than those who received arts instruction only in school, the strong independent effect of school-based arts instruction on adult museum attendance suggests that school-based instruction can in fact promote the acquisition of high-status cultural attitudes, such that differences in initial cultural resources brought to the school by students may actually be lessened and not simply intensified.
4.2. Predictors of elite performing-arts attendance To test the appropriateness of using the predictors of museum attendance to predict high status arts participation more generally, and simultaneously to discover possible differences in the correlates of different indicators of cultural capital possession, I next calculate two logistic regression equations which estimate the probability of elite performing-arts attendance, These equations use the same independent variables as those employed in the museum attendance equation. As Table 2 shows, school-based arts lesson taking has a significant independent effect on elite performing-arts attendance, although the difference in sizes of effect of purely school-based lesson taking versus lesson taking outside of school is larger for performing arts attendance than for museum attendance. Subjects who had exclusively school-based arts instruction as children are about one and one-half times more likely to report having attended an opera, ballet, or classical music concert than are subjects who had no instruction, whereas subjects who had arts lessons outside of school are about twice as likely to be attenders. The larger effect of school-based lessons on museum attendance, and of outside-ofschool lessons on elite performing-arts attendance, may be attributed in part to correspondence between the field in which lessons were taken and the event being attended. As Orend (1988) noted in his analysis of the 1982 SPPA, childhood lessons in
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Table 2 Logistic regression models predicting elite performing-arts attendance Independent variables
Without lessons variables
With lessons variables
Education (in years)
B
0.2409 * * *
0.2170
0.0200 0.2837 * ° *
0.0216
Income (in natural log)
s.e. B s.c.
0.0625
0.0685 -0.5204
s.e. B
0.2011 0.3959 * '
0.2180 0.2607
0.0895 0.0179 * ' 0.0029 0.7660 * *
0.0987 0.0184 0.0032
Central city o f an S M S A
s.e. B s.e. B
SMSA, not central city
s.c. B
0.1352 0.3920 '
B
G e n d e r ( i = female, 0 = m a l e ) Age
Mother's education Father's education School-based arts lessons only Arts lessons taken outside o f school Constant
s.e.
0.1310
B s.e. B s.e.
0.0853 * ° 0.0235 0.0676 ° * 0.0194
B s.e. B s.e. B s.c.
0
0.3302
-0.5609 * "
Race (I = Black, 0 = other)
¢
S
0.8732 0.1471 0.4122 0.1425 0.0527 0.0258 0.0596 0.0213 0.3754 0.1281 0.7158
- I 1.0619 * ° ° 0.6768
0.1135 - 11.1245 0.7474
" p < 0.05, two-tailed; ' * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * * " p < 0.001, two-tailed. Equation without arts lessons: N u m b e r of cases used in analysis = 4158. Model c h i - s q u a r e = 566.214 ( p = 0.0000; d f = 9). Equation with arts lessons: N u m b e r of cases used in analysis = 3859. Model chi-square = 541.323 (p = 0.0000; d f = II).
performance have an especially strong association with adult attendance rates. In the 1992 SPPA, for which the effects of school-based and outside-of-school lesson taking on museum attendance are nearly equal, the percentage of students (14 percent) in the school-based lesson category who had taken lessons in the visual arts (not art appreciation, but actual creation) is comparable to the percentage of students in the outside-ofschool lesson category who had taken visual-arts lessons (20 percent). In the case of performing arts attendance, on which the effect of lesson taking outside of school is almost twice as large as the effect of school-based lesson taking, 93 percent of subjects in the outside-of-school lesson category had taken lessons in ballet, instrumental or vocal music performance, whereas only 71 percent of those in the school-based lesson category had taken lessons in those fields. Thus, some of the difference in the effect of school-based lessons versus lessons taken outside of school on elite performing-arts attendance may be attributed to different degrees of correspondence between the subject of the lessons and the type of event being attended. However, given the difference between the effects of the other independent variables on museum attendance, compared to their effects on elite performing-arts attendance,
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
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some of the strength of the correlation of outside-of-school lesson taking with elite performing-arts attendance might also be attributed to the fact that ascriptive characteristics generally have a stronger effect on elite performing-arts attendance than on museum attendance. Income, race, type of residence, and lesson taking outside of school all have stronger effects on performing-arts attendance than on museum attendance. The regression results suggest that elite performing-arts attendance is a pastime in which wealthy, White, urban women whose childhood socialization included lessons in the performance arts provided through the initiative of their parents are particularly likely to participate. Whereas in museum-attendance model 2, women are 1.18 times more likely to be attenders than are men, in the second model of performing-arts attendance, women are 1.30 times more likely to be attenders than are men. This particularly strong association between being female and attending high status arts performances, given the strong correlation of the latter with income, race, and lesson taking outside of school, reinforces Mohr and DiMaggio's (1996) argument with regard to Project Talent data, that whereas for boys, cultural capital serves as a means of mobility, for girls it serves as part of a prescribed high status culture. Notwithstanding the stronger effects of income, race, and gender on elite performing-arts attendance, and even the lesser responsiveness of the latter to educational attainment, school-based lesson taking still shows an independent, positive effect on the probability of performing-arts attendance, just as it did in the museum attendance models. Those who had arts instruction solely in school are about 1.5 times more likely to report attendance at the elite performing arts, and 1.7 times more likely to report attendance at museums, than are those who had no lessons. This does not indicate, however, those characteristics which would make the subject more or less likely to take advantage of or have access to school-based instruction in the arts. To answer this question, it is necessary to perform an additional analysis, this time estimating the probability of taking arts lessons in school, given the subject's childhood characteristics.
4.3. Predictors of lesson taking Table 3 shows the results of a logistic regression model which estimates the probability of the subject's having taken exclusively school-based arts lessons, given his or her gender, race, current age (not the age at which lessons were taken, but the present age of the adult subject), and parents' education. In this model, the variable representing school-based lesson taking equals one if the subject reports having taken arts lessons in school as a child, and zero if the subject reports never having taken arts lessons as a child. Unlike in the previous equations, subjects who have taken lessons outside of school are treated as missing cases and excluded from the analysis. This is done so that the model may be understood to compare the characteristics of those who have never had arts lessons to the characteristics of those who have had arts lessons in school, just as the regression of lesson taking outside of school (also shown in Table 3) compares those who have never had arts lessons outside of school to those who have. If, in the school-based lessons model, those who had taken lessons outside of school were included in the analysis, then one would have instead a comparison of those who had
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Table 3 Logistic regression models predicting lesson taking Independent variables Race (1 = Black, 0 = other) Gender ( I = female. 0 = male) Age Mother's education Father's education Constant
B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. B s.c. B s.e. B s.e.
In school only
Outside of school
-0.4316 0.1518 0.1758 0.0848 - 0.0204 0.0029 0.1280 0.0247 0.0843 0.0207 - 2.5995 0.3103
-0.6337 0.1600 0.8311 0.0780 0.0143 0.0024 0.1899 0.0208 0.1360 0.0172 -5.9361 0.2855
S
J
* p < 0.05, two-tailed; * * p < 0.01, two-tailed; * ° * p < 0.001, two-tailed. Regression of school-based lesson taking: Number of cases used in analysis = 311 I. Model chi-square = 236.495 ( p = 0.0000; df = 5). Regression of lesson taking outside of school: Number of cases used in analysis = 4217. Model chi-square = 492.113 ( p = 0.00190; df = 5).
taken e x c l u s i v e l y s c h o o l - b a s e d lessons with those w h o had n e v e r taken lessons a n d with those w h o had taken lessons both in and outside o f school. It is clear f r o m the regression results that the probability o f taking c h i l d h o o d arts lessons, in or outside o f school, is strongly affected by race, gender, and f a m i l y b a c k g r o u n d (as indicated by p a r e n t ' s education). A g e also has a slight effect, suggesting, as w o u l d be e x p e c t e d , that school-based arts instruction is m o r e c o m m o n in the recent than in the m o r e distant past, and that lesson taking outside o f school is slightly less c o m m o n a m o n g y o u n g e r generations than a m o n g older generations. H o w e v e r , it is also e v i d e n t that the effects o f race, gender, and parents' e d u c a t i o n are consistently l o w e r for school-based lesson taking than for lesson taking outside o f school. T h i s is especially true o f the effect o f gender. W h i l e w o m e n are 2.30 times m o r e likely to h a v e taken lessons outside o f school than are boys, they are only 1.19 t i m e s m o r e likely to h a v e taken s c h o o l - b a s e d lessons. 7 H e r e again, the strong association b e t w e e n b e i n g f e m a l e and r e c e i v i n g instruction in the arts which is supplemental to that p r o v i d e d in the school, like the strong association o f f e m a l e g e n d e r and performing-arts attendance, supports the a r g u m e n t that for w o m e n especially, participation in the arts is part o f a prescribed status culture. The lesser predictability of s c h o o l - b a s e d lesson taking by gender, race, and parents' education suggests that arts instruction p r o v i d e d by the schools m a y p r o v i d e an alternative w a y for children with smaller inheritances o f cultural capital to gain e x p o s u r e
7 Again, the calculation of probabilities of school-based lesson taking is based on a comparison of those who have had arts instruction only in school with those who have had no arts instruction. Subjects who have had arts instruction both in and outside of school are excluded from consideration. To include the latter group would be to risk picking up those characteristics which are predictive of taking lessons outside of school.
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to and familiarity with the arts. This exposure in turn has a positive influence on subjects' orientation toward high status cultural behavior as adults, as indicated by the effect of school-based lesson taking on probabilities of attendance at museums and the elite performing arts.
5. Conclusion Analysis of the results of the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts demonstrates that arts instruction provided by the schools does have a significant independent effect on adult participation in the high status arts, independent of measures of family influence such as parents' education and lesson taking outside of school. And while the probability that a child will receive instruction in the arts in school is determined in part by ascriptive characteristics such as race and parents' education, these characteristics have a much smaller effect on the probability of receiving school-based arts instruction than on the probability of receiving instruction outside of school. School-based arts instruction has a significant effect on adult participation in the high status arts, and especially on museum attendance, for which the effect of lessons taken in school is almost identical to that of lessons taken outside of school. The effect of school-based arts instruction is even comparable to that of parents' education, as illustrated by the finding that, while subjects with college-educated mothers are 1.52 times more likely to be museum attenders than are subjects whose mothers received only a high school education, subjects who as children received formal training in the arts exclusively through the school are !.7 times more likely to attend museums than are those who received no formal arts training. Thus, the provision of arts instruction by the school does appear to have an important effect on attitudes toward high status cultural practices for individuals with no other source of formal arts instruction and with parents of varying levels of educational attainment. The findings suggest that family background, while predictive of adult cultural practices, is tempered in its affect by socialization experiences which occur outside the family. Schools, then, which serve on the one hand to increase the range of recognition of the legitimacy of high status culture, may also serve to lessen initial differences in cultural resources among students, thus making the acquisition and exercise of cultural capital more generally attainable.
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K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
Appendix A: Means and standard deviations of variables used in the models Variable
Mean
Standard Deviation
N
Years of education Income (dollars) Race: Black Gender: female Age Central city of an SMSA SMSA, not central city Mother's education Father's education Museum attendance Performing-arts attendance Ballet Opera Classical music concert Lessons taken only in school Lessons taken outside of school
12.87 33,898 0. I 0 0.56 45.5 0.33 0.45 11.47 11.59 0.26
3.05 25,260 0.30 0.50 17.57 0.47 0.50 2.3 I 2.72 0.44
12,672 11,624 12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 4906 4666 12,736
0.16 0.05 0.03 0.13 0.18 0.24
0.37 0.21 0.18 0.33 0.38 0.42
12,736 12,736 12,736 12,736 5591 5345
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
217
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218
K. Kracman / Poetics 24 (1996) 203-218
References Andreasen, Alan R., 1991. Expanding the audience for the performing arts. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In: Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey (eds.), Power and ideology in education, 487-51 I. New York: Oxford. Collins, Randall, 1979. The credential society. New York: Academic Press. Collins, Randall, 1992. Women and the producation of status cultures. In: M. Lamont and M. Fournier (eds.), Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality, 213-231. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, Paul, 1982. Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status culture participation on the grades of U.S. high school students. American Sociological Review 47, 189-201. DiMaggio, Paul and John Mohr, 1985. Cultural capital, educational attainment, and marital selection. American Journal of Sociology 90, 1231 - 1261. DiMaggio, Paul and Francie Ostrower, 1992. Race, ethnicity, and participation in the arts. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. DiMaggio, Paul and Michael Useem, 1978. Social class and arts consumption. Theory and Society 5, 141-161. Kalmijn, Matthijs, 1994. Mother's occupational status and children's schooling. American Sociological Review 59, 257-275. Menard, Scott, 1995. Applied logistic regression analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mohr, John and Paul DiMaggio, 1996. The intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. In: Michael Wallace (ed.), Research in social stratification and mobility. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Murnane, Richard J., Rebecca A. Maynard and James C. Ohls, 1981. Home resources and children's achievement. Review of Economics and Statistics 63, 369-377. Orend, Richard J., 1989. Socialization and participation in the arts. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Schuster, J. Mark Davidson, 1991. The audience for American art museums. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press.