Compare methods

	Bogardus Social Distance Scale	Index of Dissimilarity
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1925	1955
Originator	Emory S. Bogardus (building on Robert E. Park)	Otis Dudley Duncan & Beverly Duncan
Type	Cumulative (Guttman-type) attitude scale of willingness for social contact	Index of evenness of two groups across units
Seminal source	Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308. (Mead Project digital archive, Brock University)	Duncan, O. D., & Duncan, B. (1955). A methodological analysis of segregation indexes. American Sociological Review, 20(2), 210–217.
Aliases	Bogardus scale, social distance scale (Bogardus), cumulative social distance scale, Bogardus social distance measure	dissimilarity index, Duncan index, D index, segregation index
Related	5	5
Summary	The Bogardus social distance scale, devised by Emory Bogardus in 1925, measures the degree of acceptance or rejection people feel toward members of other social, ethnic, or national groups. Respondents indicate the closest social relationship they would willingly accept with a target group, across an ordered series ranging from marriage and close friendship through neighbor and coworker down to exclusion from the country. Because the items form a cumulative (Guttman-type) hierarchy, a single score summarizes how much social distance a person places between themselves and each group.	The index of dissimilarity, often called the Duncan segregation index, measures how unevenly two groups — such as two racial or occupational groups — are distributed across a set of units like neighborhoods, schools, or occupations. It ranges from 0, when both groups have identical distributions across units, to 1, when the units are completely segregated, and has the intuitive interpretation of the share of one group that would have to relocate to achieve an even distribution.