Bogardus social distance scale

Updated on Dec 09, 2024

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The Bogardus social distance scale is a psychological testing scale created by Emory S. Bogardus to empirically measure people's willingness to participate in social contacts of varying degrees of closeness with members of diverse social groups, such as racial and ethnic groups.

The scale asks people the extent to which they would be accepting of each group (a score of 1.00 for a group is taken to indicate no social distance):

As close relatives by marriage (i.e., as the legal spouse of a close relative) (score 1.00)

As my close personal friends (2.00)

As neighbors on the same street (3.00)

As co-workers in the same occupation (4.00)

As citizens in my country (5.00)

As non-citizen visitors in my country (6.00)

Would exclude from entry into my country (7.00)

The Bogardus social distance scale is a cumulative scale (a Guttman scale), because agreement with any item implies agreement with all preceding items.

Research by Bogardus first in 1925 and then repeated in 1946, 1956, and 1966 shows that the extent of social distancing in the US is decreasing slightly and fewer distinctions are being made among groups. The study was also replicated in 2005. The results supported the existence of this tendency, showing that the mean level of social distance has been decreasing comparing with the previous studies. A web-based questionnaire has been running since late 1993. Internet users are encouraged to submit their responses here where the maintainer of this site has posted at least two papers that update research on social distance.

For Bogardus, social distance is a function of affective distance between the members of two groups: ‘‘[i]n social distance studies the center of attention is on the feeling reactions of persons toward other persons and toward groups of people.’’ Thus, for him, social distance is essentially a measure of how much or little sympathy the members of a group feel for another group.

Criticisms

The assumption of a universally applicable ordering of options and, with it, the assumption of its implication that rankings are interpersonally comparable lead to the following potential problems:

First, individual options within the scale may be insufficiently refined, with the effect that a respondent's ordering of options may be different for different subtypes of one or more options presented as undifferentiated.

Second, the cumulative status of the scale as presented is vulnerable to individual, subcultural, and cultural differences in the relative positions of these items, as well as to changes in those orderings since the scale's development.

Third, the assumption of an equal difference in quantitative social distance between the various options complicates any effort at generalization and/or comparison, whether in intrapersonal or interpersonal comparisons and whether for time-specific, longitudinal, or intervalic surveys.

Bogardus’s conceptualization is not the only one in the sociological literature. Several sociologists have pointed out that social distance can also be conceptualized on the basis of other parameters such as the frequency of interaction between different groups or the normative distinctions in a society about who should be considered an "insider" or "outsider."

The scale has been criticized as oversimplified because social interactions and attitudes in close familial or friendship-type relationships may for at least some persons be qualitatively different from social interactions with and attitudes toward relationships with far-away contacts such as citizens or visitors in one's country.

References

Bogardus social distance scale Wikipedia

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