What are the temporal dynamics of taste?

Abstract

While the social-structural construction of cultural taste has been a sustained subject of inquiry within the sociology of culture, its temporal dynamics have not received the same treatment. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data (1982-2012) and a novel age-period-cohort estimation strategy that treats cohort effects as age-by-period interaction effects, we detail how (a) age-graded trajectories, (b) historic fluctuations, and (c) generational acculturation jointly determine the temporal dynamics of cultural omnivorousness among Americans. First, we find that omnivorousness accumulates over the life-course in age-graded trajectories. Individuals experience their peak levels of omnivorousness in the mid-to-late stages of adulthood. Taste acquisition is most rapid in the early phases of adulthood, and slows down towards the late phases of adulthood. Second, omnivorousness is subject to unpredictable historic fluctuations. Sharp increases in the 1990s recess and stabilize in the two decades to follow. Third, generational acculturation affects omnivorousness in uneven ways. Baby boomers experience higher than expected levels of omnivorousness, while the cohorts preceding and succeeding the Baby Boomers instead experience lower than expected levels of omnivorousness. Generational acculturation may also manifest most strongly in the early and late stages of adulthood. Our results imply that any temporal analysis of culture cannot avoid dealing with the age, period and cohort identification problem, that the period affect associated with the 1992 wave of the SPPA persists even in an age-period-cohort analysis, and that generational differences are endogenous to any time-invariant index of cultural taste.