Data, methods and interpretation in analyses of cultural consumption: A reply to Peterson and Wuggenig

Abstract

Peterson’s and Wuggenig’s critical comments refer specifically to our paper ‘Social stratification and cultural consumption: the Visual Arts in England’ (Chan and Goldthorpe, 2007c). However, their criticisms could, at least in some of their more general aspects, be taken to apply to all of the contributions to the special issue ofPoetics in which our paper appeared, and of which we were Guest Editors. We would therefore wish this reply to be in turn understood as having a wider reference than to our paper alone, and we shall in fact have occasion to refer, if only briefly, to the work of several of our colleagues. We consider Peterson’s and Wuggenig’s commentaries together under the following three headings: data, analytical methods and interpretation, although as regards methods we are chiefly concerned with Wuggenig’s position. 1. Data Both Peterson and Wuggenig seek to show that our paper is flawed through its reliance on the secondary analysis of data of a kind that is inadequate to our substantive concerns. As a preliminary point here, we may note that Peterson (p. 301) begins by contrasting our approach with that ofBourdieu (1984) which, in his view, ‘represents a classic case of a purpose-built questionnaire’. The contrast is unfortunate, for while Bourdieu’s questionnaire is indeed purpose-built, his survey is technically flawed both as regards sampling 1 and – as we