“What are the uses of Bogardus’ social distance scale and of Likert scale? Discuss.” (2002)
- Emory Bogardus and Rensis Likert each built a scale to solve the same underlying problem — how to turn an unobservable attitude into a number — but aimed at very different targets.
- Bogardus’s Social Distance Scale, developed in the 1920s, measures one specific thing: the degree of acceptance or rejection a person or group is willing to extend to members of another social group.
- Likert’s summated-ratings scale, by contrast, is a general-purpose instrument that can be pointed at almost any attitude object at all — a policy, an institution, a belief system, a social role.
- This answer takes each scale’s actual use in turn, then draws the contrast explicitly, since confusing a narrow, purpose-built tool for a general-purpose one (or vice versa) is the most common error in describing them.
Bogardus’s Social Distance Scale: Measuring Graded Inter-Group Acceptance
- The scale asks respondents how close a relationship they would accept with members of a named out-group, moving through a graded sequence — from the closest bond (acceptance by marriage/kinship) through friendship, neighbourhood, employment, and citizenship, down to willingness merely to admit the group as visitors, or outright exclusion.
- Because the steps are cumulative and ordered — accepting a group by marriage implies accepting it at every looser level too — the scale’s structure anticipates the logic later formalised by Louis Guttman’s scalogram approach to unidimensional scaling, though Bogardus arrived at it independently and earlier.
- Classic use: measuring racial, ethnic, caste, and religious prejudice and the degree of social distance a majority group maintains toward a minority — the scale was originally built to quantify American attitudes toward different immigrant and racial groups.
- Its distinctive strength is capturing a graded willingness rather than a flat yes/no: two respondents who both reject a group are treated very differently if one would still accept them as co-workers while the other would exclude them from the country entirely — a distinction a simple prejudice/no-prejudice question would erase.
- Contemporary use: the format remains a standard tool for studying caste-based and communal social distance within India — measuring how far members of one caste or religious community are willing to extend commensality, neighbourhood proximity, or marriage alliance to another — and, internationally, for gauging host-population attitudes toward immigrant, refugee, and religious-minority groups, where researchers have continued adapting and re-validating the original item set for contemporary social contexts.
Likert’s Scale: A General-Purpose Instrument for Measuring Any Attitude
- Rensis Likert’s method presents respondents with a set of statements about the attitude object and asks them to indicate their degree of agreement or disagreement, typically on a five- or seven-point range running from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” with responses on each item summed into a single total attitude score — hence “summated ratings.”
- Its major practical advantage over an older method like Thurstone’s equal-appearing-intervals scale is relative simplicity of construction: Likert items do not require an expert panel to rate the scale value of every statement in advance, only a straightforward item-analysis step to check that each statement correlates with the total score.
- This simplicity, combined with easy amenability to statistical analysis — means, standard deviations, correlations, and factor analysis can all be run directly on Likert-type data — is what has made it the default attitude-measurement format across the social sciences.
- Use: because it is not tied to any single subject matter, the Likert format has been applied to attitudes toward government policy, gender roles, religious belief, consumer products, job satisfaction, and virtually any other object a researcher wants to quantify — it is the format underlying most modern opinion polling and policy-attitude surveys.
- A live methodological debate persists around exactly how Likert data should be analysed — whether the ordered categories should be treated strictly as ordinal (calling for medians and non-parametric tests) or, as is overwhelmingly common practice, treated as approximately interval data suitable for means and parametric statistics — a debate current survey methodology has not fully settled even as the format’s popularity has continued unabated.
The Contrast in Practice
- Bogardus answers one very specific sociological question well — how close is a group willing to let another group get? — and remains the tool of choice whenever the research question is explicitly about inter-group boundaries and prejudice.
- Likert trades that specificity for range: it can be redeployed for practically any attitude object with only the statements rewritten, which is exactly why it, and not Bogardus’s scale, became the default instrument across market research, political polling, and organisational surveys.
- The two are not competitors so much as tools calibrated for different jobs — a researcher studying caste-based exclusion in a locality would reach for Bogardus’s format, while one studying attitudes toward a new welfare scheme would build a Likert battery.
- Both scales share the same founding insight: that a social attitude, though unobservable directly, can be operationalised into a number precise enough for statistical analysis.
- Bogardus’s continuing relevance lies in its unmatched sensitivity to the degree of inter-group acceptance, a dimension a blunt prejudice/no-prejudice item cannot capture.
- Likert’s continuing dominance lies in its combination of ease of construction and statistical tractability, which explains its near-universal presence in contemporary survey instruments.
- Together they illustrate a broader methodological point: the right scale is chosen by matching the instrument’s design logic to the specific structure of the attitude being measured, not by defaulting to whichever tool is most familiar.