Travelling with Albert Gi? Comparing Nominal, Ordinal and Interval Approaches in Comparative Studies of Social and Cultural Spaces

Dominique Joye, Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund and Yannick Lemel

No 2016-38, Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics

Abstract: In this paper we re-introduce the Gi?-framework which allows us to compare different methodological designs applied to the same data. Our empirical case is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s homology hypothesis, developed in " La Distinction" , postulating a correspondence between a " social space" (defined by variables describing economic and cultural capital) and a "cultural space" (defined by variables describing cultural preferences and tastes).Using data from three countries, France, as in " La Distinction," and Norway and Switzerland as contrasting countries, we evaluate the strength of the relationship between social and cultural spaces.. Substantially, we ?nd that the structures in the three countries share a lot of similarities. Methodologically, we test the impact of the level of measurement attributed to the variables, from interval to nominal, to see which measurement properties are the most important in the models used. We also question the established research praxis on the direction of the analyses of the relationship b etween cultural and social spaces: Instead of regarding one of these spaces as the " target" – we prefer, in line with the idea of homology, to consider symmetry between these spaces, using canonical correlation analysis. In other words, we discuss how far methodology and measurement matter when discussing social and cultural spaces.

Pages: 31
Date: 2016-08
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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