Discuss the social distance scale

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (1921:440) first defined social distance as the tendency to approach or withdraw from a racial group. Emory Bogardus conceptualized a scale that could measure social distance empirically.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 items used, with their corresponding distance scores, follow. People are asked whether they would be willing to work alongside someone or be a neighbor to someone of a different group, and, showing the least amountof social distance, be related through marriage. Over the 70-year period in which the tests were administered, certain patterns emerged. In the top third of the hierarchy are White Americans and northern Europeans. Held at greater social distance are eastern and southern Europeans, and generally near the bottom are racial minorities.

Generally, the researchers also found that among the respondents who had friends of different racial and ethnic origins, they were more likely to show greater social distance— that is, they were less likely to have been in each other's homes, shared in fewer activities, and were less likely to talk about their problems with each other. This is unlikely to promote mutualunderstanding.