Participation and Persistence in High School Elective Music Ensembles

In this study, we examined demographic patterns of participation and persistence in high school elective music ensembles. We extend prior research that has only compared music and non-music students by explicitly modeling persistence across multiple years of ensemble enrollment. The research draws on data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 and employs a zero-inflated Poisson regression model to analyze the data. This hurdle model, suitable for count data with a large number of zero observations, allows us to jointly examine factors related to enrolling in at least 1 year of a music ensemble (moving from 0 years to 1 year of music) and those factors related to accruing additional years of music ensemble enrollment (moving beyond 1 year to multiple years). We found that family socioeconomic status, birth-assigned sex, academic achievement, shared parent/student outside arts event attendance, and out-of-school arts engagement were significant predictors of both students’ music participation and persistence. By examining persistence, we add important nuance to the prior research examining demographic predictors of elective high school music enrollment, particularly for issues of birth-assigned sex and socioeconomic status in the choral context.