Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis: The Case of the Cultural Omnivore Reexamined

Goldberg, Amir

doi:10.1086/657976

Cited by 227 publications

(381 citation statements)

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“…On their own, both approaches explain a process that results in cultural differentiation along a singular and crisp dimension of interpretative consensus. But recent work in cultural sociology demonstrates that individuals differ not only in their beliefs and preferences but also in the dimensions of meaning along which these beliefs and preferences are distributed (Goldberg 2011;Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014). Fused together, associative diffusion and network theory appear to explain the emergence of such a schematically heterogeneous world.…”

Section: Flache and Macy 2011)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Goldberg

Stein

2018

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Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. In this paper, we propose an alternative explanation which we refer to as associative diffusion. Drawing on two insights from research in cognition-that meaning inheres in cognitive associations between concepts, and that such perceived associations constrain people's actionswe propose a model wherein, rather than beliefs or behaviors per-se, the things being transmitted between individuals are perceptions about what beliefs or behaviors are compatible with one another. Conventional contagion models require an assumption of network segregation to explain cultural variation. In contrast, we demonstrate that the endogenous emergence of cultural differentiation can be entirely attributable to social cognition and does not necessitate a clustered social network or a preexisting division into groups. Moreover, we show that prevailing assumptions about the effects of network topology do not hold when diffusion is associative. * Direct all correspondence to Amir Goldberg: amirgo@stanford.edu; 650-725-7926. We thank Rembrand M. Koning, Daniel A. McFarland, Paul DiMaggio, Sarah Soule, John-Paul Ferguson, Jesper Sørensen, Glenn Carroll and Sameer B. Srivastava for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Section: Flache and Macy 2011)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Goldberg

Stein

2018

Preprint

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“…The proportion of ''cultural omnivores,'' that is, persons consuming both popular and highbrow cultural products, has risen in the past decades, as well as the variety of their activities and preferences (Goldberg 2011;Lena and Peterson 2008). Nonetheless, highbrow activities are a relevant part of the omnivore cultural consumer pattern.…”

Section: Cultural Activities and Dimensionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educational stratification in cultural participation: cognitive competence or status motivation?

et al. 2014

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This article examines educational stratification in highbrow cultural participation. There are two contrasting explanations of why cultural participation is stratified. The status hypothesis predicts that people come to appreciate particular forms of art because it expresses their belonging to a certain social group. The cognitive hypothesis stipulates that cultural participation depends on a person's cognitive abilities, which is why educational stratification in cultural consumption is so evident, especially among consumers of high culture. However, to test these explanations, previous work predominantly relied on an individual's level of education, thus confounding the two mechanisms. We test the status and cognitive hypothesis using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey, covering 18 countries. First, by including an individual's literacy skills, we separate the effect of cognitive ability from that of education. The remaining effect of education can be seen as a better measure of the status-related motives for cultural participation. Second, we examine whether stratification varies across countries. The findings show that the status-related effect of education on cultural participation is smaller in societies with larger educational expansion and intergenerational educational mobility. This is in line with the status explanation, which holds that boundaries N. Notten (&)

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“…In this article, I examine the theoretical intuitions implicit in current work to arrive at this missing definition. I demonstrate that in order to detect shared cultural schemas like those in Goldberg's (2011Goldberg's ( :1404Goldberg's ( -1405) motivating example, relationality must measure the degree of linear dependency between two individuals' vectors of responses. This lends itself to a simple, intuitively plausible formal model of schematic similarity as linear dependence between response vectors, and it suggests that Pearson's correlation may already provide a solution for the task that relationality sets out to solve.…”

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confidence: 95%

“…From the perspective of culture and cognition, this task is a search for shared "cultural schemas"-abstract cognitive structures that specify relationships between cultural elements. In a high-profile recent work, Goldberg (2011) proposed an innovative methodology for identifying groups of survey respondents who share such cultural schemas, which he terms Relational Class Analysis (RCA). RCA has rightfully garnered a substantial amount of attention across diverse domains of study, including cultural tastes (Goldberg 2011;Daenekindt 2017), public opinion (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014;Wu 2014), organizational behavior (Miranda, Summers, and Kim 2012), and economic sociology (DiMaggio and Goldberg 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This is a crucial limitation because, without such a definition, RCA's accuracy in locating such schemas cannot be convincingly demonstrated. Goldberg (2011) introduced RCA using a survey of musical tastes as his case study. Taking a cue from relational theories of meaning (e.g., de Saussure [1916] 2013; Lévi-Strauss 1963), RCA searches the data for schemas that define not the musical tastes themselves but the relationships between these tastes-that is, which genre tastes are perceived as similar and which are perceived as opposed.…”

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Improving the Measurement of Shared Cultural Schemas with Correlational Class Analysis: Theory and Method

Boutyline

2017

SocScience

139

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Measurement of shared cultural schemas is a central methodological challenge for the sociology of culture. Relational Class Analysis (RCA) is a recently developed technique for identifying such schemas in survey data. However, existing work lacks a clear definition of such schemas, which leaves RCA's accuracy largely unknown. Here, I build on the theoretical intuitions behind RCA to arrive at this definition. I demonstrate that shared schemas should result in linear dependencies between survey rows-the relationship usually measured with Pearson's correlation. I thus modify RCA into a "Correlational Class Analysis" (CCA). When I compare the methods using a broad set of simulations, results show that CCA is reliably more accurate at detecting shared schemas than RCA, even in scenarios that substantially violate CCA's assumptions. I find no evidence of theoretical settings where RCA is more accurate. I then revisit a previous RCA analysis of the 1993 General Social Survey musical tastes module. Whereas RCA partitioned these data into three schematic classes, CCA partitions them into four. I compare these results with a multiple-groups analysis in structural equation modeling and find that CCA's partition yields greatly improved model fit over RCA. I conclude with a parsimonious framework for future work.

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Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis: The Case of the Cultural Omnivore Reexamined

Cited by 227 publications

References 50 publications

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Educational stratification in cultural participation: cognitive competence or status motivation?

Improving the Measurement of Shared Cultural Schemas with Correlational Class Analysis: Theory and Method

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