The function of music education in the growth of cultural openness in the USA

Abstract

This study asks the question: What is the relationship between cultural omnivorousness and music education in the USA? Cultural omnivorousness is a general disposition towards the consumption of culture in which the person possessing such an attitude is open to consuming a broad range of cultural products. Survey data used for this analysis comes from the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts 2002. A total of 17,135 completed surveys were collected from a sample of US households. The sample was selected using a stratified, multistage, clustered design and drawn from Census Bureau population counts. Several conclusions are derived from the findings. First, although causality cannot be determined, people who have taken music education classes are more omnivorous than people who do not take music education classes. Second, music education can potentially mitigate symbolic boundaries between racial groups through an increase in omnivorousness for minorities. Third, music education increases omnivorousness in a discriminating fashion. Music education increases the liking of some genres while having no effect or decreasing the liking of other genres, especially country music. This third conclusion mirrors past findings suggesting that while society is favouring racial and ethnic inclusion, cultural openness does not extend to social groups with low levels of educational attainment.

Keywords:

• music
• education
• omnivore
• univore
• multiculturalism

Notes

1. More detailed documentation, as well as the survey and data itself, can be found online at: http://www.cpanda.org/cpanda/getDDIsummary.xq?studyID=a00080

2. The non-weighted N for regressions is 2409.

3. The three categories for metropolitan status are central city, balanced city and non-metropolitan city. These categories are analogous to the more common terms urban, suburban and rural.

4. Comparing the means of youth popular and adult popular for different age group shows that older audiences have higher means on adult popular and lower means on youth popular.

5. One final check of these factors is a reliability analysis. Reliability analysis gives the correlations between three or more variables connected with any given factor. The test statistic used to determine if any set of variables are reliability related to one another is called Cronbach's alpha. The commonly accepted alpha for a reliability analysis is over 0.6. Reliability analyses were done on three of the four factors. The alphas are presented in Appendix 2. The country/western factor is composed of only two variables, and thus a reliability analyses is not necessary. The analyses suggest that the factors extracted are reliably measuring the proposed latent variable.