Compare methods

	Bogardus Social Distance Scale	Isolation Index
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1925	1954
Originator	Emory S. Bogardus (building on Robert E. Park)	Wendell Bell (formalization of P* indices)
Type	Cumulative (Guttman-type) attitude scale of willingness for social contact	Exposure-dimension segregation index
Seminal source	Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308. (Mead Project digital archive, Brock University)	Bell, W. (1954). A probability model for the measurement of ecological segregation. Social Forces, 32(4), 357–364.
Aliases	Bogardus scale, social distance scale (Bogardus), cumulative social distance scale, Bogardus social distance measure	P* isolation index, interaction index, exposure index, Bell isolation 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 isolation index measures the exposure dimension of segregation: the extent to which members of a minority group are exposed only to one another rather than to members of other groups. It answers the question 'what is the own-group share of the typical neighbor (or classmate, or coworker) that a member of the focal group encounters?' Unlike evenness measures, it depends on the relative size of the group as well as its spatial distribution.