Explain the concept of social distance. Discuss its types.

In sociology, social distance describes the distance between individuals or 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 the perceived likeness of beliefs.

While French sociologist Jean-Gabriel De Tarde explored some related concepts as early as 1903, the modern construct of social distance are often tracked to work by sociologist Georg Simmel. 

Simmel’s conceptualization of social distance is represented in his writings about a hypothetical stranger and how he is simultaneously near to and far from his social group.

Simmel’s lectures on this 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’s creation of the first Social Distance Scale played a large role in popularizing Park’s and Bogardus’s conceptualization of social distance, which had some significant differences from Simmel’s original ideas.

Today, while studies of social distance do exhibit some features of a cohesive body of literature, the definitions and frameworks 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 the “Bogardus social distance scale” was typically basing his scale on this subjective-affective conception of social distance:

“lin social distance studies the center of attention is on the feeling reactions of persons toward other persons and toward groups of people.”

Normative social distance: A second approach views social distance as a normative category. Normative social distance refers to the widely accepted and often consciously expressed norms about who should be considered as an “insider” and who an “outsider/foreigner”.

Such norms, in other words, specify the distinctions between “us” and “them”.

Therefore, normative social distance differs from affective social distance, because it conceives social distance is conceived as a non-subjective, structural aspect of social relations. 

Examples of this conception can be found in some of the works of sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim and to some extent Robert Park.

Interactive social distance: Focuses on the frequency and intensity of interactions between two groups, claiming that the more the members of two groups interact, the closer they are socially.

This conception is similar to the approaches in sociological network theory, where the frequency of interaction between two parties is used as a measure of the “strength” of the social ties between them.

Cultural and Habitual Distance: Focuses cultural and habitual which is proposed by Bourdieu (1990). This type of distance is influenced by the “capital” people possess.

It is possible to view these different conceptions as “dimensions” of social distance, that do not necessarily overlap.

The members of two groups might interact with each other quite frequently,but this does not always mean that they will feel “close” to each other or that normatively they will consider each other as the members of the same group.

In other words, interactive, normative and affective dimensions of social distance might not be linearly associated. 

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