Measuring movement in cultural landscapes

Abstract

Culture is often conceptualized as a landscape, where the peaks represent popular beliefs, institutions or practices, while the valleys represent those that receive infrequent attention. In this article, we build on this metaphor, and explore how individuals navigate these cultural landscapes. Using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we follow participants' survey response trajectories across three cultural domains, each with particular topographical features. We show that movement across cultural landscapes is adequately captured by a gravitational model of change, which specifies transition probabilities among cultural positions as a function of the distance between them and how populated they are. Nonetheless, the kind of movement that such a gravitational model would predict varies widely depending on the initial topography of the landscape. Our work highlights that charting landscapes is not only useful cartography, but also an analytical tool that helps us understand the kind of cultural trajectories we should expect individuals to follow.