Paul DiMaggio - "Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of the U.S. High School Students"

They note that past research has shown that neither family background nor measured ability are good predictors of variation in student grades. Put forth that aspects of cultural style are only loosely associated with family background.

He uses Weber's concept of status culture. Elite status groups generating or appropriating their won specific, distinctive traits. Elite groups are defined as collectivities bound together by personal ties and a common sense of honor based upon and reinforced by shared conventions. This shared culture

aids group efforts to monopolize for the group as a whole scarce social, economic and cultural resources. This is accomplished by providing coherence to existing social networks and facilitating the development of comembership, respect, and affection out of which new networks are constructed. Status cultures are seen as resources used to promote intergenerational status persistence.

Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital is used. Cultural capital is defined as instruments for the appropriation of symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought and possessed. Cultural capital is inculcated in childhood and is recognized by those who also posses the same cultural capital.

Weber put forth the idea that as the market system corroded the status cultures. Instead people begin to choose from a handful of status cultures. This brings forth the idea of status culture participation. This puts forth the idea of status as a cultural process and not an attribute of individuals. A person can display various cultural resources that are appropriate for different settings.

A series of hypotheses are proposed:

1) Measures of cultural capital are related to one another in a manner that suggests the existence of a coherent status culture of which they are elements.

2) Cultural capital is positively related to school success, in particular to high school grades.

3) Cultural Capital mediates the relationship between family background and school outcomes.

3a) Cultural capital's impact on school success is largely net that of family background.

4) Returns to cultural capital are highest for students from high status families and least to students from low status families. (cultural reproduction)

4b) Returns to cultural capital are highest for students who are least advantaged. (cultural mobility model)

In measuring cultural capital student self reports are used. High culture is the point of reference. There are several reasons for this, 1) classical music etc. represent the most popular form of prestigious art forms, 2) to the extent that there is a common cultural currency in the elites, high culture best represents this, 3) if cultural capital is not supposed to depend on the school system, then because high culture receives little attention it is appropriate and 4) high culture is an element of elite culture that teachers regard as legitimate.

Three things were measured.

Attitude: students rated their interest in specific artistic activities and occupations on a scale.

Activities: based on questions about the extent to which students have created visual arts, performed publicly, attended arts events, or read literature.

Information: tests designed to tap familiarity, appreciation, and historical knowledge about literature, music and art.

Four separate factors are identified. Each represents a type of cultural resource and each represents a coherent set of interrelated traits:

Cultural interests: all the attitude measures except interest in attending symphony concerts and cultivated self-image.

Cultural Information: Three cultural information tests scores.

Cultural Capital: this includes both activity and attitude measures.

Middlebrow activities: non-high culture creative pursuits.

The expectation that knowledge of one type of high culture will be related to another type. If a person has mastery of one, then they will be familiar with others. The results indicate that cultural information test scores in different cultural disciplines are strongly associated. Therefore students

who engage in one kind of cultural activity are more likely than others to be interested in any other high cultural activity.

Factor 1 should have less of an effect on grades than factor 2 or 3, because it measures attitudes rather than actual behavior or information. Factor two is expected to have a major impact because students can display what they know and in a manner that teacher will reward and recognize. Factor three would have the greatest impact if cultural capital is a set of interests, dispositions, behaviors, and styles that re learned and enacted socially. Factor 4 should have very little impact.

Results:

1) Students cultural information test scores were largely determined by some underlying set of aptitudes, skills, and motivations that lead students to do well or poorly on tests.

2) Cultural capital is positively related to high school grades.

3) Cultural interests and middlebrow activities have no significant impact on grades.

These results support the expectation that both the cultural reproduction and mobility models have. This is that participation in prestigious status cultures has a significantly positive impact on grades. There is no support for the idea that differences in grades are the result of academic achievement

motivation. There is no real evidence of the extent that cultural capital plays in mediating the relationship between school success and family background.

For women the cultural reproduction model fits better. Returns to cultural capital are greatest to women from high status families and least to women from low status families. For men it is a different story. The positive impact of cultural capital on grades is restricted to students from lower and middle status households. These results are more in line with the cultural mobility model. These results were part of an overall pattern that suggested that cultural capital plays different roles for men and women.

Women participated more in high cultural activities. The individual culture measures were more strongly related to ability scores for men. The specific attitude, activity, and information measures were, in every case, more strongly correlated with family background for girls than for boys. Lastly

the interrcorrelations among the cultural measures were stronger for high status girls than for lower status girls. No such differences were seen among boys. High cultural interests might have been prescribed for teenage girls and not for boys.

Due to the fact that there was a weak correlation between cultural capital and family background a couple of points are drawn. The first is that the data provided a limited amount of information. Secondly, however, it shows that educational attainment is a very imperfect proxy for cultural capital. A third possible lesson is that single measures of cultural capital or participation in status cultures are inadequate.

Although these limitations are present, the data does reflect that cultural capital has an impact on high school grades. What also needs to be taken away from this study is the image of status as a process.