Understanding the Relationship between Cultural Participation, Cultural Capital and Behaviour: A Survey-based Approach to Account for the Role of Individual Differences
Creators: name: Orjuela Ruiz, Sergio
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2025
Subjects: classificationCode: 380106
subject: Experimental economics

description: Abstract
Understanding what determines cultural participation is important given that active engagement in cultural life is associated with a wide range of benefits for individual and society at large. This thesis presents two manuscripts stemming from a survey designed to provide insight into cultural participation in Australia. The first manuscript analyses the role of individual differences linked to personality, curiosity and values, to explore how these are related to cultural participation across a range of different cultural activities. The second manuscript then turns attention to the impact of behavioural barriers and enabling factors on the cultural participation of individuals across a range of different cultural activities. Both manuscripts rely on data collected using a bespoke survey that provided a representative sample (n=558) of participants drawn from the Australian population. The survey captures different types of cultural participation that are distinguished within the analysis, and which are based on categories contained in the Australia’s National Arts Participation Survey (NAPS) as commissioned by Creative Australia. 
Aside from the usual variables (such as income and education) that are positively associated with cultural participation, attention is focused on cultural capital and individual difference characteristics. The research tests whether individual differences explain different types of cultural participation and whether behavioural attributes have a place within the conceptualisation of cultural capital. More specifically, the first manuscript examines the role of behavioural determinants on the level of cultural participation in a range of different cultural activities. The results reveal that individual differences play a role in cultural participation, although the specific behavioural traits that matter differ across different types of cultural participation associated with different cultural activities). Thus, we find evidence that psychological factors play an important role in determining cultural participation and that, just as engagement in cultural life may be socially stratified, cultural participation is also behaviourally stratified.
The research responds to the problem of addressing how cultural participation might also be lifted which is of interest and relevance to policy makers. In the second manuscript focus turns to identifying barriers and enablers to cultural participation, as well as taking a step back to examine what actually determines cultural participation across different cohorts of the population, not only on the basis of socio-economic characteristics, but also in terms of behavioural characteristics such as personality and curiosity. 
Using a survey approach that incorporates questions about participants cultural consumption and participation habits over the past 12 months, as well as sections related to demographics, personal characteristics and psychometric scales to measure personality, curiosity, values, wellbeing and perceptions of barriers and enablers to arts participation, the research present new evidence on that incorporates behavioural characteristics to aid understanding of factors that determine cultural participation.