Social science studies of cultural activity commonly focus on class, gender and ethnicity and treat age as an unimportant background variable. This paper demonstrates the central importance of age as a factor affecting cultural consumption, using data from the ‘Taking Part’-Survey of England. As well as seeking to describe the main aspects of age differentiation, the paper unpacks what is often called, in a simplified way, ‘age effects’. The socio-historical dynamics leading to the existence of age effects are examined, firstly

theoretically, and secondly, through some empirical examples (doing sport, playing a musical instrument/singing, cinema, visiting exhibitions or collections of art/photography/sculpture, doing textile crafts). A number of influences are shown to account for the importance of age: health, the individual life course, the different socio-economic background of cohorts, and other, more complex cohort effects. Possible interpretations of these cohort effects on cultural practice are discussed at the end of the paper.

 Keywords

Cultural practices; cultural participation; age; life course; cohorts; generation