School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Youth attitudes to the arts

Emmison, Michael ; FROW, JOHN ; Turner, Graeme ( 1990/91)

Summary: The study was organised in two parts. The first involved a survey of representations of the arts and of creative activities in television programmes with high ratings for the target age-group, and in magazines oriented to a teenage market. The second, which was based on the initial findings, involved discussions held in a number of focus groups about perceptions of and processes of everyday familiarity with arts activities. In both stages of the study we worked with a deliberately open conception of the key categories, ‘youth’ and ‘the arts’. We posited that the category ‘youth’ was strongly differentiated in terms of age, class, and gender, and much of our analysis was devoted to this internal differentiation and to its correlation with attitudinal variations. In the case of the category of ‘the arts’, we worked with inclusive criteria in order to get at the full range of activities which might count as in some sense aesthetic, and we paid particular attention to the presence or absence of normative aesthetic criteria: that is, we were concerned both with establishing the spectrum of activities engaged in and with the frameworks by which this spectrum was articulated and organised.