Social Distance

A Brief History of the Concept

In sociology, the use of the social distance concept dates back at least to the work of the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who wrote of the interesting social position occupied by a stranger newly arrived in a group. He characterized this position as a precarious balance between “nearness and remoteness” (Simmel 1908/1950, p. 402). The stranger is near in the sense that he or she has entered a group or community and has interacted with some members, perhaps for purposes of trade, but is remote or distant in that she or he does not share the common history, culture, or norms of the indigenous community members.

The American sociologist Emory Bogardus's conception of social distance, however, with its attendant [Page 1308]measurement scale, is perhaps the best known and most widely used version. He defined social distance as “the degree of sympathetic understanding that functions between person and person, between person and group, and between group and group” (Bogardus 1959, p. 7). Bogardus originally developed the scale, a series of agree-disagree statements indicating increasingly lower levels of “sympathetic understanding” and thus greater social distance, in 1924 to assess perceived relations between an individual and racial-ethnic populations. The seven statements on this version of the scale range from willingness to marry a member of the specified racial-ethnic population to unwillingness to allow a member of this population to live in the respondent's country. As a tool that provided a measure of the degree of racial prejudice felt between populations, Bogardus's Social Distance scale was employed throughout the twentieth century by numerous scholars interested in race relations. The frequency of the concept's use in this form, however, should not be misinterpreted as the natural limits of the idea of social distance. Indeed, as Bogardus's definition indicates, he came to perceive that the concept should operate in many contexts. Consequently, Bogardus and other researchers have developed social distance scales for such attributes as age, religion, education, occupation, and social class.

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