Education plays a bigger role than location or race when it comes to unequal cultural access and engagement in the US

In their article published online first in the American Behavioral Scientist, authors Ateca-Amestoy and Prieto-Rodriguez used sociodemographic and geographic variables from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), United States, 2017 (ICPSR 37138) to study the factors that contribute to arts exposure and participation gaps across different regions and demographic groups in the US. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and distributed by the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC), the SPPA 2017 is composed of responses from both the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the SPPA supplement to the CPS, which was administered in July 2017 to about half of the 60,000 CPS households. Basic CPS items in this data provide labor force activity for the week prior to the survey, as well as demographic characteristics that include race, educational attainment, and occupation. The 2017 SPPA supplement includes two core components: a questionnaire used in previous years to ask about arts attendance and literary reading, and a newer survey about arts attendance, venues visited, and motivations for attending art events. The supplement also includes five modules designed to capture other types of arts-related information, including frequency of participation, types of artistic activities, training and exposure, musical and artistic preferences, school-age socialization, and computer and device usage related to the arts.

According to Ateca-Amestoy and Prieto-Rodriguez, “research about social inequality in the cultural domain is still scarce.” They created inequality indexes to analyze cultural access or participation using the SPPA 2017 data, since it provided them enough socioeconomic and geographic (e.g., neighborhood and combined statistical area) information to characterize various dimensions of inequality. Other data in the SPPA 2017 allowed the authors to index each household’s cultural engagement, “from popular to highbrow culture, passive to active, and live to digital.” The specific forms of culture evaluated were pop music and movies, classical music and active music, performing arts, heritage and visual arts, and writing and reading. Of their many findings, the authors determined that spatial and racial characteristics are not the most relevant for access to culture. Rather, education was the most correlated with access. In addition, even though one would think that online participation would help overcome the inequalities associated with physical participation in the arts, the authors found, “The pattern of digital participation is remarkably similar to the pattern of physical participation, thus showing some evidence that the divide and stratification of cultural practices in the real world translates to digital practices.”