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Concept
Social distance
Summary
In sociology, social distance describes the distance between individuals or social groups in society, including dimensions such as social class, race/ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Members of different groups mix less than members of the same group. It is the measure of nearness or intimacy that an individual or group feels towards another individual or group in a social network or the level of trust one group has for another and the extent of perceived likeness of beliefs.
Modern research into social distance is primarily attributed to work by sociologist Georg Simmel. Simmel’s conceptualization of social distance was represented in his writings about a hypothetical stranger that was simultaneously near and far from contact with his social group.
Simmel’s lectures on the topic were attended by Robert Park, who later extended Simmel’s ideas to the study of relations across racial/ethnic groups. At the time, racial tensions in the US at the time had brought intergroup relations to the forefront of academic interest. Robert Park tasked his student, Emory Bogardus, to create a quantifiable measure of social distance. Bogardus’ creation of the first Social Distance Scale played a large role in popularizing Park’s and Bogardus conceptualization of social distance, which had some significant differences from Simmel’s original ideas.
Contemporary studies of social distance do exhibit some features of a cohesive body of literature, but the definitions and frameworks sometimes show significant variations across researchers and disciplines.
Nedim Karakayali put forth a framework that described four dimensions of social distance:
Affective social distance: One widespread view of social distance is affectivity. Social distance is associated with affective distance, i.e. how much sympathy the members of a group feel for another group. Emory Bogardus, the creator of "Bogardus social distance scale" was typically basing his scale on this subjective-affective conception of social distance: "[i]n social distance studies the center of attention is on the feeling reactions of persons toward other persons and toward groups of people.
Official source
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