Measuring cultural capital through the number of books in the household

Cultural capital is frequently measured via the number of books in a respondent’s household. Despite this measure’s widespread use, its quality remains largely unclear. To remedy this, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of the measurement properties of two items measuring past and present objectified cultural capital via the number of books in the household of the respondent’s family of origin and the respondent’s current household, respectively. For this purpose, we used data (N = 3260) from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012 survey in Germany and the 2015 wave of a follow-up study (PIAAC-L). We analyzed the two items’ distributions (total sample and separately by age-group), test-retest reliability over 3 years (for past cultural capital only), and their convergent and divergent validity (i.e., correlations with socioeconomic status, literacy and numeracy skills, and cultural and literary activities). Our analyses (1) reveal that past and present objectified cultural capital are substantially but not perfectly related (ρ = .52), which may reflect intergenerational transmission; (2) demonstrate that the item measuring past objectified cultural capital shows high test-retest reliability over three years (ρ = .74); and (3) attest to both the convergent and divergent reliability of both items, as indicated by systematic yet only small to medium-sized correlations with socioeconomic status, literacy and numeracy skills, and cultural and literary activities. At the same time, our analyses (4) underscore that cultural capital is not a uniform construct, highlighting that the number of books captures a specific aspect of the concept (i.e., objectified cultural capital). Our findings can serve as a benchmark for future research on cultural capital.