It is interesting careful and refereed academic research with as noted large samples.

The consumption categories are taken from another research study which arrived at them by analysing arts/culture 'consumption'; concert, theatre, cinema going etc; (and not any form of production which would also be interesting to look at). They are silly attention grabbing, but rather diverting names tthat mask a mixed measure of consumption intensity and breadth in a given culture domain.

Inactive = not much of anything at all
Paucivore = some sampling but not a lot
Univore = more intensive consumption but focused within an interest that is part of a domain
Omnivore = broad and intense sampling within a domain

It is my understanding that the terms are to refer to within a domain so that a music omnivore would consume classical, stage, rock, jazz, world more broadly and deeply than an omnivore who would consume deeply within one interest.

The key distinction for the researchers is between Class (employment contract and income as markers in conjunction with the NSO calssification of occupations and taken to mean economic postion and circumstance with no implication of any cognitive or cultural factors - simply life chances) and Status (Occupational prestige and affiliation patterns well established through decade or more of rresearch in a half dozen or so countries the social pecking oreder that most certainly carries cognitive and cultural values.)

Class predicts voting better than Status ie we vote for our interest; Status predicts values better than class, ie we approve/disapprove on our values derived/supported by social affiliations/exclusions)

Higher status individuals will on average consume more culture, more broadly and more deeply. higher class individuals may or may not consume culture. Since education and professional standing drive status, this entails that education influences cultural consumption; hence we should make much more effort in schools to promote culture, since its its consumption is driven by values and relationships that may be much more amenable to influence than Class. Culture and its consumption is a tractable object of public policy. At least that is how i read the research on muy current understanding of it.

Well, exactly! The fact that it's 'high culture' - well, it doesn't say anything about ME, other than the fact that I enjoy it!! I always get annoyed and upset about people who think that the arts are only for middle-class people, and the rest of us OUGHT NOT to be interested in the arts - had a very long argument about this on OPERA-L once; although the terms of reference might be slightly different in the US (it's a very US-based forum), there is still the attitude that opera is not 'for the masses' and OUGHT not to be 'for the masses', it ought only to be for the ELITE, i.e. 'us' - whoever WE are!!
Well look, I'm unemployed and live in a council flat - but I've been an opera-lover for about 45 years, and I did my Ph.D on Wagner. Does the fact that I'm unemployed and live in a council flat mean I OUGHT NOT TO LOVE OPERA???  It's nonsense!!! Although I do know people who have been brainwashed into thinking that the arts are 'too elitist for the likes of us'. It's time people got it through their heads - it's not the AUDIENCE who are the elite - it's the PERFORMERS!!! (At least I hope so - that's why we go to see them!!!)

OK, rant over - for the time being!

  

Hey, some of my best friends are in the SWP!!!
Actually they're not, but it is true that I seem to lead two parallel lives, or at least have two parallel sets of friends - my opera cronies, as my partner disparagingly calls them, who never come to political meetings, and my comrades in GREEN LEFT and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, who never come to the opera!!!

A further irony here is that - with a few exceptions - the majority of performers in opera are very ordinary people, most have had State schooling, there is a heavy sprinking of left-voting souls amongst them (pace the industrial action at the Paris Opera and La Scala recently and ongoing).  Nor are they in the slightest "precious" about their art - many/most of them will go out to nightclubs, rock or jazz events, and some of them are even active in those genres (viz Peter Hoffmann as a well-known example.... but I know another tenor here in Moscow who sings both Mozart and rock, very successfully in both genres.. and a Leporello/Sarastro who does cabaret and revue).

I think it sometimes comes as something of a surprise to people like the Fiends Of The Royal Opera to discover that their heroes and heroines are quite regular and normal people offstage.  In fact my entire repertoire of crude and obscene jokes was learnt from singers...  primarily from mezzo-sopranos, I might add

The producers of high culture have generally inhabited a lower class of society to the consumers of the same for many many centuries.

Er. Careful Brother Baz because surely Brother Pace is correct here ....

"There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis." 

You could easily argue that the status quo had been eroded much earlier. In 1638 Cavalli - along with his associates Orazio Persiani, Felicita Uga, and Giovanni Balbi - took the lease of the small and decrepit Teatro di San Cassiano in Venice, which had to be refitted and decorated before a first season of commercial opera could open there (with Le Nozze di Teti e Peleo).  No nobleman or patron was involved - this was entirely a "bums-on-seats" operation which flourished or failed according to whether the public bought tickets. The cramped space at San Cassiano, and the need to reduce expenditure as far as possible, caused a radical rethink in the way works were written.  The luscious rich scorings of Monteverdi were out - replaced by a small string ensemble whose players could optimally double on a few other instruments. Gone too was the large chorus - replaced by a small semi-chorus, or ideally no chorus at all. Complicated and expensive stage machinery was also in short supply, and plot-lines that required the Gods to appear in Heaven, or Neptune to emerge from the briny deep disappeared.  Busenello's libretti about political- and sex-scandals (ideally, if possible, both at once) were a better "sell" than allegorical stories of Greek & Roman deities. Faustini appeared as the second librettist - almost all of his stories involve the supernatural, ghosts, and other crowd-pulling stuff.  These mould-breaking changes became even more notable in Cavalli's next venture - opening a public opera house in Naples, where the boisterous audiences had no time at all for deities, and preferred stories of comical and venal servants who won-out over their masters.  Cavalli's role as a "producer" of Monteverdi's later works is clear here - the scoring of ULISSE and POPPEA is entirely different from ORFEO, and requires just a small ensemble (no cornetts, sackbutts etc are scored... although this hasn't stopped modern performances from introducing them anyhow).  And the plot-line of POPPEA ("Shock horror: Emperor divorces loyal wife to marry exploitative gold-digger") is lightyears away from the underworlds of ORFEO, and could easily be off the front page of any of the UK's red-tops (hmmm, Sarkozy comes to mind, doesn't he?  Now there's a great production concept...)

Certainly it's true that Cavalli managed to hang on to his well-paid posts as organist and maestro di capella in various Venetian churches, offering him a financial buffer against poor box office receipts, summer months in which the public would leave the city to avoid the heat, and enforced closures during Lent and other Holy Fasts.  But the opera-theatre itself remained self-supporting, and dependent on nobility only in so far as their purchase of seats or boxes brought in handy revenue.