![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article explores different ways of representing and understanding cultural participation. It employs multiple correspondence analysis to look at the clustering of participation using data from the “Taking Part” survey and uses qualitative material from participation narratives to address the meanings attached to participation and cultural engagement. The authors show that contemporary lifestyles are strongly demarcated around both the fact and the nature of participation and that the clustering of particular types of activity and inactivity shows quite clearly that not taking part in highbrow cultural activities is the norm. They go on to argue that the “deficit” model of culture employed by government is unhelpful, as what matters for health and well-being appears to be participation per se and that more work is therefore required to understand the value and significance of informal and everyday cultural practices. Nevertheless, given the continuing role of culture in the inter-generational transmission of economic and social inequalities, they also call for policies to promote cultural “omnivorousness” and tackle disengagement.
Notes
See Miles and Sullivan Citation(2010), the end-of-fellowship report on which this article is based.
“Creative People and Places” actually uses Sport England's “Active People” survey to identify areas below average participation because “Taking Part” itself is not statistically representative at local authority level.
These numbers have now been reduced to 14,000.
Correspondence Analysis is often referred to as a special version of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) (Blasius & Greenacre, Citation2006). The percentage inertia explained by axes takes the place of the percentage variance of PCA. Unlike factor analysis, correspondence analysis is a nonparametric technique which makes no distributional assumptions (Wuggenig, Citation2007). Active points are the category values of the variables used to compute the dimensions used to plot the correspondence map. Supplementary points do not contribute to the construction of the social space, but are superimposed on this space.
A disadvantage of MCA compared to standard regression methods is that, as an inductive, data-driven technique, it does not allow for an analysis which partials out certain effects in order to disentangle the relationships between variables (Chan & Goldthorpe, Citation2007). It therefore makes sense to combine MCA with other statistical techniques, so that MCA and regression can, ultimately, be thought of as different but complementary tools.
These interviews were collected as part of a study of engagement with the local cultural sector led by Miles and funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund. Cultural “users” and “non-users” were identified with the help of the arts development agency Arts About Manchester using its own e-bulletin to identify those interested in the arts and the marketing organisation CACI's mailing lists to identify households declaring a lack of interest in arts attendance and participation.
The interviews for this study were collected by a joint CRESC/CLS team as part of an ESRC-funded project entitled “Social Participation and Identity: Combining quantitative longitudinal data with a qualitative investigation of a sub-sample of the 1958 Cohort Study” (RES-503-25-0001, PI Jane Elliott). A further 50 interviews have subsequently been carried out in partnership with the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods.
The term “quadrant” here should not be read as referring to some kind of solid “causal” category; it is used merely to direct the reader's attention to the area of the diagram under discussion. What matters most for the purposes of interpretation is the proximity or otherwise of one variable to another.