Life Course Outcomes of Cultural Practices - Instrumental Benefits?

The long-term effects of participating in high cultural activities as a teenager are often assumed to be instrumentally beneficial in and of themselves; this paper assesses these effects, investigating whether any apparently effects are merely masking the effects of class and status. Using longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, we investigate the associations between teenage participation in a range of cultural activities and later educational attainment, destination class, and income. We do so by investigating whether any apparent benefits are down to instrumental value, or merely the cultural capital ascribed to participating. In addition to this, we investigate the relationships between different activities: whether a pure substitution effect emerges, as predicted by many commentators, or whether some activities are associated with higher levels of participation more generally. We find that there are clear positive associations between patterns of highbrow cultural participation and educational attainment, and no clear associations between lower-brow cultural participation and educational attainment. These effects largely disappear for jobs, however; while reading for pleasure is positively associated with entering the salariat, the expected positive effects of other highbrow participation, and negative effects of lowbrow participation, fail to materialise. There is no substitution effect in cultural participation. Our results indicate that, while the apparent instrumental value in cultural participation has some empirical support, this value is largely down to the cultural capital ascribed to participating, rather than participating being valuable in and of itself. This indicates that the privileging of some cultural activities over others is ultimately arbitrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]