Cultural Omnivorousness in the Domains of Music, Film and Literature: Evidence for a Partial Overlap

Contemporary research on the social side of cultural taste highlights a notable trend of cultural omnivorous taste among socially privileged groups. However, social stratification of taste encompasses different cultural domains, such as music, film or literature. But are omnivores in music also more likely to be omnivores in film and literary taste, and otherwise? Motivated to contribute to the debates on comparability in omnivore studies, this study tests the assumption of overlap of the omnivorous taste, using the KuBiPaD I survey data from Germany. Employing latent profile analysis, this study offers empirical insights revealing a partial overlap. The results show that it is common for omnivores in one domain to be omnivores as well as paucivores in other domains. The co-occurrence of omnivorousness in one domain and univorousness in another one is rare. When comparing the social stratification of omnivorous classes, three domains demonstrate dissimilarities. In the end, the overlap hypothesis is only partially supported, which encourages future research to select cultural domains to study omnivorousness more thoughtfully.