Social Distance Scale

The below mentioned article provides study notes on social distance scale.

Sociologist R.E. Park (1923) coined the term social distance for the first time while describing the observed fact that the kinds of situations in which contact occurs between a dominant group and subordinates vary in their degree of intimacy like, from Kinship by marriage, residence in the same neighbourhood, work in the same occupation to absolutely no contact.

Emory Bogardus, an eminent sociologist of the University of Southern California in 1942 developed a scale for measuring the social distances among various groups in the United States. It was further given prominence by Katz and Allport under the able guidance of Gallet and Bogardus.

Bogardus was interested in measuring racial attitudes, attitudes of people towards different races, towards different nationalities and comparing them through his social distance scale.

The procedure of the construction of the scale is as follows:

The investigator first formulates various statements indicating different degrees of acceptance or rejection of the group.

The subject has to indicate how close or how far away he is from the members of the other group. A distance is measured by these statements which are basically psychological. A favourable attitude is indicated by the closeness and an unfavourable attitude is indicated by distance. The greater the distance the greater is the unfavourable attitude and less the distance the greater is the favourable attitude.

The psychological distance is progressively increased in the scale as one proceeds from the first to the last statement starting from close kinship by marriage to exclusion from the country. Bogardus thus asked the respondents to indicate to which of the following steps they would admit members of the various groups in the United States of America.

1. To close kinship by marriage.

2. To my club as personal chums.

3. To my street as neighbour.

4. To employment in my occupation.

5. To citizenship in my country.

6. As visitors only to my country.

7. To exclude from my country.

The Bogardus scale in brief, aims at the construction of a scale of social distance at which any group desires to keep others with whom it has functional relations. Bogardus devised a list of statements which represented varying degrees of social distance or social intimacy and the job of the subjects is to agree to a statement of the list.

On the basis of these responses of a dominant group, other groups can be ranked from those who are completely acceptable to have marriage and close personal relations to those who are totally unacceptable for contacts except those in which the dominant group is in a superior position or to those who are entirely unacceptable for any type of contact.

According to Sherif arid Sherif when the responses by members of one group towards others are highly similar, we may say that the rank order of social distances maintained from other groups represents a scale of social distances that are norms of that group.

This scale was used in the United States for about 20 yean, by social scientists and it was noticed that relationship among its various ethnic and nationality groups remained quite stable.

The findings showed that throughout the United States there was consensus and similarities among people in social distance for various parts of the country. In short, people of different racial groups have projected extremely similar picture of social distance for various ethnic groups of United States.

For example, Americans of different ethnic groups viewed that the English and Canadian people were the most acceptable to them as citizens, as neighbours, as social equals and as Kinsmen.

This proves that American people irrespective of their ethnic groups have minimum or least social distance to the Canadians and English people. On the contrary, the Hindus, the Negroes and the Turks are put in the other extreme of the social distance scale by the same people, indicating maximum social distance.

The Southern and Eastern European nations are placed in between these two extremes of social distance scale indicating moderate social distance. It has been observed that this social distance not only exists with all American people, it also persists through time. Thus, this uniform pattern of social distance seems not to be influenced by space, time and race in the United States. This can be named as social distance norm.

Bogardus conducted the first study in 1926 and the second study in 1946. Except the change of 1926 in social distance towards Japanese and Chinese in 1946 (because of second World War) they maintained the same position of 1926 towards all the other nations.

Similar results were obtained by Hartley (1946) and Spoerl (1951). It is thus concluded that persons irrespective of their occupation, education, income and race have the same pattern of social distance and the most striking aspect of the response of the respondents is their remarkable correspondence.

Studies of Hartlay (1946), Guilford (1931), Meltzer (1939), Zeligs and Hendrickson (1933-1934, a & b) conducted on the school children and adults living in the different parts of United States, indicate very similar social distance scales.

“Typically, the subordinate group members ranked their own group near the top of the scale indicating greatest intimacy, but the ranks of other groups resembled those made by the dominant group”. The following table on social distance in the United States in 1926 and 1946 can reveal changes in racial distances.

The table represents data from Surveys of stratified, representative nationwide samples in US conducted in 1942, 1956, 1963 and 1964. Kupuswamy (1951) conducted a study on 591 students of Madras State (India) using a modified Borgardus social distance scale.

In this study the subjects were instructed to mention to what extent they would admit Brahmins, Christians, Harijans, higher caste non-Brahmins, lower caste non-Brahmins, Muslims, Parsis and Sikhs to the social relationship mentioned below:

1. To Kinship by marriage.

2. To take food in your own dining room.

3. As an intimate personal friend.

4. As a guest in your house.

5. As your neighbour.

6. As your acquaintance.

Results showed that:

(i) out of 591 respondents 18.1% indicated that they would admit any one of the above groups to any degree of social intimacy,

(ii) 80% mentioned varying degrees of social distance and 1.9% did not give any response.

Further analysis of result showed that:

(i) In general the higher caste non Brahmins were given the relatively higher position by all the four groups. Brahmins were given low position in the scale by the non-Brahmin respondents as a result in the total preference they got the third position,

(ii) The Christians were given high preference by the Brahmins, non- Brahmins and Muslims. As a result, they got second position in the group as a whole.

(iii) All the groups except the Christians have a lower position to the Harijans than to the lower caste non-Brahmin group.