Community Database: Marital Status, Presence of Children, and Homeownership

Erika Sung is an ASU doctoral student in community resources and development where she focuses on non-profit management.  Her analysis of the Arizona Arts & Cultural Census/Community Database is underwritten by a grant from the Lodestar Foundation.  

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Over the last couple of weeks, we examined basic demographic characteristics of arts and culture ticket buyers in Arizona. This week, we take a look at how the patron profile differs by marital status, presence of children and home ownership rate.

Following the graph below, we see that 70% of the arts and culture ticket buyers represented in the Community Database are married people. Why do arts and culture events appear to draw so many more married people than single?

One of the reasons might be the presence of children. Attending arts and culture events near their home is an easy way to spend free time with children. Let’s look at the below graph. However, contrary to this expectation, it shows distinguished results between ticket buyers who have children and those who do not. People who have children represent 42.7%, of those buying arts and cultural event tickets; rather, people who do not have children show higher proportions of ticket buying action (57.3%). So, the presence of children is not the solo reason to influence ticket buying action for married people. It may be valuable to look at other factors such as lifestyle rather than simple presence of children.

Let’s look at ticket buying by home ownership. As indicated below, home owners comprise 98.4% of the households in the Community Database!  Why would that be when, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the proportion of home ownership of Arizona is 68.3%?  Have we actually just declared 31.7% of Arizona’s population (i.e. non-homeowners) to be NON-arts & cultural attenders?)  

That’s a fascinating and important question – but having checked with TRG Arts to make sure we really are concluding what we THINK we are concluding, let’s just call it too-early in the process for this to be considered a settled fact.

So far, no further data in the Community Database helps us to figure out what aspects impact on the ticket buying action depending on people’s home ownership. However, regardless of the presence of children, married people are clearly attractive arts and culture consumers. It will be worthwhile to investigate further what makes them attend arts and cultural events in Arizona.