Bridging nodes: How race/ethnicity affects the breadth of cultural tastes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Taste in music, literature, and the arts has been a rich site for studying the relationship between culture and stratification for decades. This work consistently finds that socioeconomic status shapes the volume of culture consumed, yet questions about the breadth of musical tastes remain. The effects of race/ethnicity inequality also remain understudied in most of the existing research, the effects of which often serve as controls, but are not variables of interest. To address these issues, using two years of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (n = 8601), we use regression analysis to differentiate between the volume of cultural items and the breadth of taste patterns. The findings suggest that the volume of cultural items selected is predicted by levels of education, but the breadth of choices is more clearly shaped by race/ethnicity differences. The taste patterns of Whites tend to have less breadth than those of Blacks or Hispanics in the US. Minorites are more likely to consume music from both non-dominant and dominant groups than Whites. These findings confirm existing qualitative work which suggests that minorities must navigate between dominant and non-dominant cultural worlds, in a way that their White counterparts do not. Following this we argue that the difference between volume and breadth warrants further quantitative examination.