Cultural and outdoor activities in Canada: Who does what?

Abstract

This article innovatively combines the analysis of both cultural and outdoor activities in Canada, activities that have been mostly studied separately until now. This study thus feeds into the debate between the distinction framework (focusing on the highbrow/lowbrow opposition) and the omnivorism thesis (distinguishing between omnivorous and univorous groups) in cultural sociology. From Latent Class Analysis (LCA), this study identifies five clusters, which differentiate people practicing either or both cultural and outdoor activities. The clusters are labelled as follow: “tele-univore,” “digital indoor,” “conventional indoor,” “outdoor univore,” and “omnivore.” Binary logistic regressions reveal that education, age and rural/urban identity are the key factors in identifying who practices which activities. The findings are threefold. First, while confirming the omnivore theory, our results show that cultural capital matters more than economic capital in explaining who participates in which activities. Second, rural people tend to be slightly more engaged than urban people in consumptive and motorized outdoor activities and less in all cultural activities. Third, the shift to digitization and the increase in outdoor activities appears to have exacerbated the divide between older and younger generations.