Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics - Survey

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'. </p>

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.