The Social Stratification of Cultural Consumption: Some Policy Implications of a Research Project∗

This paper describes a research project that we have recently completed on the social stratification of cultural consumption, and then aims to present our main findings and to bring out their implications for certain aspects of public policy in relation to the arts. Our research is relevant in particular to policy issues that arise in regard to access to, and participation in, cultural activities and to the extent and causation of social inequalities in cultural consumption. Until quite recently, there has been a serious lack of information on cultural consumption in Britain that (i) derives from well-designed samples of the national population; (ii) covers most major cultural domains; and (iii) allows individuals’ levels and patterns of cultural consumption to be linked to a wide range of their socio-demographic characteristics. A major step in remedying this deficiency, at least so far as England is concerned, came with the Arts in England Survey of 2001, which was carried out by the Office of National Statistics on behalf of Arts Council England. Our own research is based on the secondary analysis of the data-set that