Accountable countability. Digital cultural consumption among young people and the tools used to measure it

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to a discussion on how surveys of cultural and media consumptions among children and young people can be as accurate and relevant as possible. Digital culture represents challenges for both cultural statistics, cultural research and cultural policy: Cultural policy tools and categories of cultural statistics need to be developed to reflect digital cultural consumption and production. Using a survey among upper secondary school pupils in Norway about their cultural and media consumption, we discuss how surveys can become more precise tools for both research and policy. We argue in favour of a type of inductive and multi-dimensional cultural consumption survey in which questions and categories are developed based on broad knowledge of the relevant target group’s cultural consumption. We show that there is a mismatch between public statistics and actual consumption and discuss how statistics and the categories on which they are based can be developed further.