Cultural Activity Diversity and Community Characteristics: An Exploratory Study

Cultural diversity has been conceptualized and studied in diverse ways. On the one hand, cultural diversity can be conceptualized based on people’s ethnic and national backgrounds. On the other hand, cultural dimensions are defined based on individuals' behaviors and traits. Sociologists further categorize the latter depending on the degree of typicality in cultural artifacts/activities and individuals’ omnivorousness over cultural tastes. Although each dimension of culture-related concepts provides meaningful implications for community-level characteristics, it is still unclear how each dimension of cultural characteristics is related to other community characteristics. This paper suggests a concept of cultural activity diversity, the diversity of cultural activities as a whole in a community, and provides an exploratory analysis for the relationships between cultural characteristics and socio-economic features across 28 U.S. metropolitan areas using local event datasets.