Kulturellt kapital & Konsumtion : Betydelsen av ”hur” svenska studenter konsumerar 

Sammanfattning: The thesis makes a contribution to the debate on the relationship between cultural consumption, cultural taste preferences and class. This field is well researched, but there is no consensus on the relationship between these variables. That cultural consumption is patterned by social status in society is one of the most fundamental insights of cultural sociology. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A social criticism of the taste assessment (1984) is a central work in the field. Over time, however, Bourdieu's vision has come to be questioned by various empirical findings. The questioning comes, among other findings, from Peterson's (2005) coinage of the cultural omnivore. Defining the cultural omnivore is an increased range of cultural preferences and a will to mix hierarchical cultural preference boundaries. The purpose of the thesis was to fill some of the gaps described by earlier research and seek out how the relations take shape in a Swedish student context. The questions the essay sought to answer were; how does the relationship looks between cultural consumption and class among Swedish students; how does the cultural omnivore reason about his or her wide taste preference; is distinctions among cultural omnivores present and how does it look? Through Exploratory sequential mixed-method, 10 interviews were conducted to later develop a survey that sought to generate some of the results that emerged in the interviews. The result shows that distinction seems to prevail in how cultural products are consumed rather than what is consumed. No clear links between cultural capital and consumption patterns were demonstrated in the results of the survey. The interviews however showed a strong link between cultural capital and how something is consumed, understood and appreciated.