Bogardus Social Distance Scale
Also known as: Bogardus scale, social distance scale (Bogardus), cumulative social distance scale, Bogardus social distance measure
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.
Key highlights
- Simple, intuitive, and quick to administer, yielding an interpretable single score per group.
- Cumulative (Guttman-type) structure summarizes a battery of items in one ordinal measure.
- Long historical record enables tracking intergroup attitudes across many decades.
- Produces clear comparative rankings of the perceived acceptability of different groups.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the Bogardus social distance scale when you want a simple, interpretable measure of intergroup acceptance or prejudice — willingness to engage in progressively intimate relationships with members of ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups. It is a classic instrument for tracking the relative acceptability of groups and changes in intergroup attitudes over time. It measures stated willingness, which may diverge from behavior and is subject to social-desirability bias; its cumulative structure should be checked (not all responses scale perfectly); and the item wording and group list must suit the cultural context. For modeling who actually connects with whom, use network homophily or the E-I index.
Strengths & limitations
- Simple, intuitive, and quick to administer, yielding an interpretable single score per group.
- Cumulative (Guttman-type) structure summarizes a battery of items in one ordinal measure.
- Long historical record enables tracking intergroup attitudes across many decades.
- Produces clear comparative rankings of the perceived acceptability of different groups.
- Measures stated willingness, not actual behavior, and is vulnerable to social-desirability bias.
- Assumes a unidimensional cumulative ordering that real responses may violate.
- The fixed item ladder and group list are culturally specific and may need adaptation.
- Ordinal scores have unequal psychological spacing between adjacent steps.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What makes the Bogardus scale a 'cumulative' scale?
Its items are ordered by intimacy so that accepting a closer relationship logically entails accepting all more distant ones. This Guttman-type structure means a respondent's full pattern of answers can be summarized by a single threshold — the closest relationship they accept — making the scale efficient and interpretable when responses conform to the ordering.
What is the Racial (or Social) Distance Quotient?
It is the group-level summary Bogardus computed by averaging individual social-distance scores across a sample for a given target group. Comparing quotients across groups yields a ranking of perceived social acceptability, which Bogardus and later researchers tracked over decades to study shifts in intergroup attitudes.
Does the scale predict actual behavior?
Not reliably. The scale measures stated willingness to accept various degrees of contact, which is an attitude. Because of the well-documented attitude–behavior gap and social-desirability bias, expressed social distance may not correspond to how people actually behave toward out-group members; the scale is best read as a measure of expressed acceptance, not conduct.
Sources
- 1.Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308. (Mead Project digital archive, Brock University)
- 2.Park, R. E. (1924). The concept of social distance as applied to the study of racial attitudes and racial relations. Journal of Applied Sociology, 8, 339–344. (Mead Project archive)
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Bogardus Social Distance Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/sociology/bogardus-social-distance-scale