Abstract:

This study has a clearly defined goal: the establishment of a scale to measure the intensity of cultural habits in our target population. To generate the scale, we handed a questionnaire to a representative sample of students at Central Connecticut State University. Cultural habits refer to the consumption of cultural artifacts, such as fictional and non-fictional books or films, plus the attendance to cultural events, like museums, theaters, concerts or art exhibits. The scale should help us explore what and how much our audience reads, and how it deals with art, history or music.

Humanities are in a dramatic decline. Academic programs in art, literature or philosophy are struggling, and in some cases vanishing from the academic offer of higher education institutions. That is accompanied by the fading of humanities in school curriculums. The disappearance of humanities may have an impact on our society. A solid humanistic foundation reinforces educational values and contributes to nourish and strengthen a critical attitude toward media contents, political issues and social dynamics. We thought it necessary to develop an instrument to measure the intensity of the cultural life of the participants in our studies, particularly audiences in educational settings.

This project happened in two different phases. During the first phase we generated a series of statements and presented them to the participants asking to determine to what extend they agreed or disagreed in a five-point Likert scale. The items explored the cultural patterns in the behavior of our students. They could be divided in three main categories: Reading habits, musical interests, and cultural activities, such as visiting museums and art exhibits, or going to the cinema and the theater. Once we collected the outcomes from a representative sample of students at our institution, we run a factorial analysis to identify patters in the response. Based on the outcomes we were able to stablish a scale of 10 items with three clearly identified factors. The first of the subscales encompasses cultural activities with a certain social component, such attending art exhibits or music concerts. The second category relates to the reading habits of the participants. Finally, a third component could be associated to what has been described as high culture: cultural artifacts and events designed for more sophisticated elites. Both the whole 10 items scale and the three sub-scales proved to have a strong reliability.

In the second phase of the project, we tested the scale in a larger study that identified factors associated to academic performance, such as school attitude, educational values, academic risk and external locus of control. Furthermore, we correlated this scale with the media usage, the fashion our students are using traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV) and the latest digital social networks.

The outcomes were significant. The cultural quotient scale showed a positive correlation with the variables associated to academic success (positive school attitude and educational values) and a negative one with those variables that predict poor academic performance (academic risk, external academic locus of control). Furthermore, the scale also revealed a positive significant correlation with the usage of high Ego-involvement media (daily national and regional newspapers, cultural and professional magazines) and a negative one with time and frequency of activity in social media.

Keywords:

Academic performance, cultural quotient, scale validation, cultural habits, media usage, social media media consumption.