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Abstract
This article explores the potential of cultural capital as explanatory factor in understanding homonegativity. Building on recent findings suggesting the need for a cultural component in understanding homonegativity, this article explores the relation between lifestyles (the measurable expression of cultural capital) and homonegativity. Using the “Social-Cultural Changes in Flanders 2006” survey (a population-wide survey in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium), we observed that homonegativity is lowest in lifestyle clusters where cultural capital is higher. This effect, furthermore, is maintained even after controlling for other homonegativity correlates. These results suggest that cultural capital, expressed by lifestyles, is a valuable addition to the understanding of homonegativity.
Notes
1. 1. Because in comparison with other segments of life, individual freedom of choice is the greatest in the leisure time, studies on lifestyles often focus on leisure time (Miles, Meethan, & Anderson, Citation2002, pp. 124–125; Otte, Citation2004). Lifestyle is often described as “a distinctive, hence recognizable mode of living” (Sobel, Citation1981, p. 28) or “a lifestyle consists of the bundles of activities and object that make up our lives. Those bundles have a kind of shape that distinguish our lives from others and yet may be similar to some others […] In the journey of our lives; there is both stability and change. We call the elements that tend to characterize how we generally construct our ‘lives’ lifestyles” (Kelly & Freysinger, Citation2000, pp. 68–69, emphasis in original).
2. 2. Lifestyle in this study does not refer to the way of living of a subgroup/subculture of society. It is by no means a reference to the pejorative way of describing the way of living of a certain group, as, for example, “gay lifestyle.” Lifestyle in this study refers to a pattern of cultural consumption found in the general population.
3. 3. The habitus is “both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification” (Bourdieu, Citation1984 [1979], p. 170),
4. 4. “Cultural Changes in the Netherlands Survey” [Culturele Veranderingen in Nederland] (http://www.scp.nl/english/Research_and_Data/Main_focus_of_research) and “Australian Survey of Social Attitudes” (http://aussa.anu.edu.au/), respectively.
5. 5. Because the original survey was in Dutch, we have translated the items; therefore, there might be some differences in nuances.
6. 6. Although limited in scope, it has been shown that this is an important indicator for studying attitudes (Elchardus & Siongers, Citation2003, Citation2009b).
7. 7. Tables of this analysis are available from the author upon request.
8. 8. Free-thinking refers to the historical movement that situates itself in the secular humanism.
9. 9. Although Protestants technically belong to the group “Christians, not Catholic,” we did not include them in this category, because in the survey this group was meant for those raised according to Catholic-Christian tradition but who do not feel Catholic themselves.
10. 10. This distinction, however, will be made only for Catholics, because there are not enough respondents to make that distinction for other affiliations.
11. 11. Explorative analyses have shown a curvilinear relationship between age and homonegativity, whereby there is no effect for people below the age of 48. As including seven categories of age (18–25; 26–35; 36–45; 46–55; 56–65; 66–75; and 75+) gives the same results, we choose to group the respondents aged 50 or less together to keep the model parsimonious.
12. 12. At first, four categories were distinguished, but in exploratory analyses the difference in attitudes toward LGBTs between “lower secondary education” and “higher secondary education” was negligible; we opted to groups these respondents together.