The Role of Preferences and Attitudes in Film Consumption

The sociological analysis of cultural consumption is usually situated in the field of social stratification research, identifying the way how cultural consumption is related to social position and examining the role cultural consumption plays in social boundary formation. Much less attention has been given to the theory of action underlying cultural consumption. Broadly speaking, there are two major perspectives that come into consideration here: The first conceives cultural consumption as the result of a deliberate (rational) decision making process based on the weighing of aesthetic preferences and situational opportunities. In contrast, the second perspective points to the importance of culturally and aesthetically shaped attitudes and dispositions guiding cultural consumption in a rather automatic way, given relevant situational cues. Since either of these perspectives brings about both theoretical and empirical problems, it seems reasonable to conceptualise cultural consumption as a joint process of conscious preference weighing and automatic attitude following. This in turn askes for a “dual-process”-model of action which is assumed here to offer a more accurate picture of the individual foundations of cultural consumption.
Drawing on recent survey data from Switzerland (conducted in February 2013), this assumption will be tested in the domain of film consumption. This dataset includes measures of the frequency of attendance to various types of films, and measures of the respondent’s preferences for as well as attitudes towards these types of films. This allows for (1) comparisons between the effects of film preferences and film attitudes on film consumption, (2) the identification of the relationship between film preferences and film attitudes, and (3) the examination of the interplay of film preferences and film attitudes in the process of film consumption.