Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics - Household Interviews

The Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) questionnaire was modelled on the French study pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). While there have been many subsequent studies that have explored the cultural tastes and practices of particular social groups or educational cohorts, or focused on particular cultural fields, there have been only a few national surveys encompassing a wide range of cultural fields. Such surveys have been conducted in Australia (Bennett et al., 1999), Britain (Bennett et al., 2009), Denmark (Prieur et al., 2008) and Serbia (Cveticanin and Popescu, 2011). In building on these earlier studies, the ACF survey sought to address the distinctive socio-cultural coordinates of a settler-colonial society with an Indigenous population asserting an increasingly strong cultural presence, and a large and growing multicultural population with a rapidly changing composition from mainly southern European sources of migration towards east and southern Asia. The key innovations in questionnaire design are that, by opting for an in-depth inquiry into patterns of consumption in the art, literary, sport, television, heritage and music fields - but excluding other areas: film and culinary practices, for example - we were able to go beyond questions relating to tastes for the main genres and patterns of participation most strongly associated with those fields, to ask our respondents whether they recognised, engaged with and, if so, liked or disliked an extensive repertoire of named cultural items. These were further differentiated according to whether they were international or Australian in provenance, ensuring that the international items were spread across Europe and America with some items from Asia. The Australian items identified for each field also included examples of Indigenous culture available to 'mainstream Australia'.

The questions focused on the six cultural fields were followed by detailed explorations of the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents. These included age, gender, occupation, class position and identification, level of education, field of study and university attended for those with tertiary education, occupations of partners, levels of education for partners and parents, ethnicity and ethnic identification, country of birth, Indigenous identification, level of income, capital holdings, housing and place of residence.

After the survey was completed, follow-up interviews with 42 participants were undertaken. Selection of those interviewed was based on accessing participants who reflected the issues and circumstances the project was examining, rather than statistically representative cohorts. Consequently, interviewees were selected to capture a range of people across age, gender, class, education and income levels. Fifteen of the participants came from the survey’s boost samples. Because of the difficulty of finding young Indigenous participants, we included an interview with one person in this category who had not completed the survey. While most interviewees were drawn from Sydney and Brisbane and their fringe areas, there was a selection from regional centres.