Measuring cultural capital using book collections. What are we missing by not asking about digital objects?

Even though Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is often criticized as poorly defined and vague, it remains a central and widely used concept in research on the reproduction of social inequality. In this regard, objectified cultural capital is most often captured by the prominent indicator of the number of books in the household. In times of advancing digitization, the question arises to what extent this indicator does neglect a crucial part of book collections—namely e-books. Using German survey data on cultural participation from 2018, we therefore assess whether a combined indicator of physical and digital book collections is more valid than the traditional indicator of number of printed books in the household. Our empirical findings indicate that, at the time of the survey, the information gains are marginal if digital collections are additionally considered.