Social Distance

Social distance refers to the tendency to approach or withdraw from a racial or ethnic group in social relationships. It is meant to summarize not merely physical distance in living alongside but also how one might react to personal relationships such as interracial marriages. This entry describes the origin and use of the term.

Theoretically, the concept has its origins in the work of Georg Simmel, who wrote about people's linkages through broad social spaces. Simmel's student Robert Park and his “Chicago School” of sociology refined the concept and directly applied it to race and ethnic relations. Emory Bogardus, with whom it is most closely associated today, operationalized social distance in such a manner to allow it to be easily measured. His social distance scale is so widely used that it is often called the “Bogardus scale.”

The scale asks people how willing they would be to interact with various racial and ethnic groups in specified social situations. The situations describe different degrees of social contact or social distance. The seven items used, with their corresponding distance scores, follow. People are asked whether they would be willing to admit each group:

A score of 1.00 for any group would indicate no social distance and therefore no prejudice. Researchers regard the Bogardus Social Distance Scale as a cumulative scale because agreement with any item implies agreement with all preceding items—that is, if you are prepared to allow one to become your neighbor, you presumably would allow them to become citizens.

The social distance scale has been administered to many different groups in other counties as well. Despite some minor flaws and certain refinements needed in the scale, the results of these studies are useful and can be compared over time and across different societies.

The attractive feature of the conceptualization of social distance is that it brings societal issues such as “race relations” down to the personal level. In addition, it is intuitively simplistic that quantifies the common conversational query, “But would you allow your daughter to marry one?”