The Bogardus social distancescale is a psychological testing scale created by Emory S. Bogardus to empirically measure people'swillingness 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 :
The Bogardus social distance scale is a cumulative 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. For Bogardus, social distance is a function of affective distance between the members of two groups: ‘‘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:
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.
