Compare methods

	Bogardus Social Distance Scale	Social Mobility Table
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1925	1927 (concept); 1970s–1980s (modern analysis)
Originator	Emory S. Bogardus (building on Robert E. Park)	Pitirim Sorokin; refined by Hauser, Hout, Featherman
Type	Cumulative (Guttman-type) attitude scale of willingness for social contact	Cross-classification of social origins by destinations
Seminal source	Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308. (Mead Project digital archive, Brock University)	Hauser, R. M. (1978). A structural model of the mobility table. Social Forces, 56(3), 919–953.
Aliases	Bogardus scale, social distance scale (Bogardus), cumulative social distance scale, Bogardus social distance measure	mobility table, intergenerational mobility table, origin-destination table, transition table analysis
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.	A social mobility table is a cross-classification of individuals by their social origin (typically a parent's class or occupation) and their own destination class, forming the empirical foundation of intergenerational mobility research. Analyzing it separates how much people move between classes, distinguishes movement forced by changing class sizes from genuine exchange, and isolates the underlying origin–destination association that measures the openness of a society.