Because individuals with higher educational levels also have higher frequencies of attendance, the distribution of visits by educational level is even more highly skewed toward individuals with higher levels of education. Upper income individuals are over-represented among visitors to each of the art forms. Weighting individuals by their frequency of attendance and constructing an income distribution of visits results in a more complicated picture because frequency of attendance does not necessarily rise with household income and the pattern differs for different art forms. With respect to race and ethnicity, the patterns become more complex. The same is true of the profile of visits to various art forms.
Women are over-represented among visitors to all of the eight key art forms except jazz.
With respect to visits, however, they are under-represented in the audiences for jazz, classical music, and dance forms other than ballet. While these are the main findings of this monograph, they only begin to scratch the surface of the detail contained in these pages. Before encouraging the reader to wade into the main text, however, it is necessary to add a few words of caution to aid in the interpretation of the findings. Because the SPPA data are the result of sampling, all of the estimates of participation rates in this monograph are subject to random sampling error. Because of that error many of the observed differences in participation rates may be attributable, at least in part, to random sampling error rather than to any real differences in participation rates.