Participation in legitimate culture: family and school effects from adolescence tot adulthood

Abstract

This paper tests Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory of participation in legitimate culture by comparing family and school effects on cultural participation in adolescence (age 14) and adulthood (around age 30). The data pertain to 1033 former students of 31 secondary schools and their siblings, aged between 25 and 35, who have been interviewed retrospectively about their participation in five art disciplines. With schoolmates and siblings data at our disposal we use a double contextual model to analyze family and school effects at two moments in the life course. In general the results support Bourdieu's cultural reproduction hypothesis. We find family background to be the main source of variation in cultural participation in adolescence and adulthood alike. School influences increase between the two stages of the life cycle, but at age 30 they are still only a third as large as family influences. We find no support for Bourdieu's cultivation hypothesis: family and school affect cultural participation independently. Lastly, the results reveal a strong consistency between cultural participation in adolescence and adulthood. Almost all this stability is generated by family and school effects