Measuring cultural capital through the number of books in the household

Abstract

Cultural capital is frequently measured via the number of books in a respondent’s household. Despite this measure’s widespread use, its quality remains largely unclear. To remedy this, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of the measurement properties of two items measuring past and present objectified cultural capital via the number of books in the household of the respondent’s family of origin and the respondent’s current household, respectively. For this purpose, we used data (N = 3260) from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012 survey in Germany and the 2015 wave of a follow-up study (PIAAC-L). We analyzed the two items’ distributions (total sample and separately by age-group), test-retest reliability over 3 years (for past cultural capital only), and their convergent and divergent validity (i.e., correlations with socioeconomic status, literacy and numeracy skills, and cultural and literary activities).