A Sociological Analysis of Cultural Capital Indices and Factors Affecting Them: A Case Study on Female Students of Payam Noor and Islamic Azad Universities, Qaen

Cultural capital is the individual’s power of identification and his/her ability to use cultural goods and includes the individuals’ sustained tendencies developed based on three subjective¡ objective and institutionalized dimensions and during the process of socialization. The aim of the present study is to assess the extent to which the students of Payam Noor and Islamic Azad Universities benefit from cultural capital and its components. More specifically¡ the paper intends to sociologically analyze the effects of leisure time¡ use of cell phones¡ consumerism¡ fashion involvement¡ body type¡ and music on the cultural capital among these students. The theoretical framework is a hybrid approach derived from Bourdieu¡ Bennett and Veblen. The sample of the study is comprised of 322 female students of Payam Noor and Azad Universities of Qaen who have been selected by stratified cluster sampling. The method of data collection is a self-designed questionnaire. The questions were checked for their reliability¡ and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.75%. SPSS 22 and inferential (factor analysis¡ regression and route analysis) and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that there is a relationship between independent variables (leisure time¡ use of cell phone¡ consumerism¡ fashion involvement¡ body type¡ and music) and the dependent variable (the cultural capital). The findings of the study indicate that the students highly benefited from cultural capital (51.24). Based on the stepwise regression¡ the most important factor influencing the students’ cultural capital was the use of cell phones with 0.309 Beta coefficient. The cultural capital predictor equation can explain 75.6 % of the variance of the dependent variable.