bogardus is officialy TEH suck

i didnt read the whole thing, but i think it says something like "fark is teh suck, and losers that spend all their time there instead of posting to unique blogs with their friends that they started are even more teh suck and like to eat kittens" ... i think .... could have misread part of it ...

Emory Bogardus and The Bogardus Social Distance Scale

Emory Bogardus (1882-1973) was one of many prolific American sociologists of the first half of the 20th century. Known best for his development of the concept of "social distance," Bogardus founded and was Chair of the University of Southern California (USC) Sociology Department for thirty-one years (1915-1946). He also founded and was the first Dean of the USC School of Social Work. He trained more than one hundred PhD and MA students and conducted or directed a remarkable output of research into ethnic communities in Los Angeles from 1911 through the 1960s. He was also the founder and editor of Sociology and Social Research, a journal featuring the work of nearly all the leading American sociologists of the twentieth century. [5] The author of Sociology (sixth edition 1937); Fundamentals of Social Psychology (4th edition 1950); History of Social Thought (fourth edition 1960); Contemporary Sociology (1931); Leaders and Leadership (1934); Essentials of Americanization (third edition 1923); Immigration and Race Attitudes (1928); The Mexican in the United States (1934); Introduction to Social Research (1936), Social Distance (1959), and literally hundreds of articles, Bogardus was a prolific but not a deep thinker. A 1937 celebration in his honor brought messages of respect from around the world, but these were decidedly reserved. Burgess praised him primarily for editing Sociology and Social Research; E.A. Ross said that Bogardus’s work "is never ‘fuzzy’ or ‘fogged’"; and Florian Znaniecki, writing from the University of Poznan, Poland, pledged that despite the "physical distance" which kept him from attending the dinner in Los Angeles, he felt no "social distance" from Dr. Bogardus. None of these authors suggested that Bogardus had contributed anything to sociology except the social distance scale.

The most significant of Bogardus’ research was that on race relations, proceeding from his role as the regional director of the Pacific Coast Race Relations Survey, directed by Robert Park in the early 1920s. As we have seen, Park clearly suggested the idea of actually measuring social distance to Bogardus, a debt which Bogardus was always careful to acknowledge (Bogardus 1959, 1967). Bogardus devised a set of seven questions intended to "reduce rationalizing...as much as possible" (1959: 30). The Bogardus Social Distance Scale in its original and 1933 revision are displayed in Table 1.

Bogardus 1925 "Would willingly admit members of each race..."	Bogardus 1933-66
1 To close kinship by marriage	Would marry
2 To my club as personal chums	Would have as regular friends
3 To my street as neighbors	Would work beside in an office
4 To employment in my occupation in my country	Would have several families in my neighborhood
5 To citizenship in my country	Would have merely as speaking acquaintances
6 As visitors only in my country	Would have live outside my neighborhood
7 Would exclude from my country	Would have live outside my country

The survey itself is elegantly simple. Each of the "distance" variables is arrayed as column headings, while ethnic group names are arrayed as row headings. The respondent was instructed to check "as many of the seven columns in each case [ethnic group] as your feelings dictate." In other words, a respondent might indicate she would have a member of a given group as neighbors and work with them in her office, and speak to them, but would not marry into that group, nor have a close friends, nor, on the other end, would she limit them only to "visitors" to her nation, nor debar them from her nation. On the other hand, it seems obvious that if a respondent would marry into a group, she would also have them as close friends, next door neighbors, etc.

In all of its versions, the scale is scored so that the responses for each ethnic/racial group are averaged across all respondents, which yields a "Racial Distance Quotient" (RDQ), with a minimum of 1.00 and maximum of 7.00. The purpose of the 1933 modification was to bring the scale more into line with the science of sociometry that had developed by that time (Campbell 1952).

Bogardus first used the scale in 1926 on 1,725 respondents who were primarily Euro-American students in 24 colleges and universities. Bogardus followed this original study with three more, similarly administered, surveys, in 1946, 1956, and 1966. Several serious methodological problems with Bogardus’s application of his own scale make it difficult to evaluate the results. The questionnaire itself is shown in Illustration 1, and the overall score results of the 1926-1966 studies are shown in Illustration 2.

In any case, however, this is not the place to review the concrete results of Bogardus’s empirical research. Rather, what interests us is the tracking of Simmel’s dual sense of "social distance." To keep an eye on that, I want to turn rapidly to the most ironic aspect of the Bogardus Scale: its suppression of geometric distance in the very face of geometric social facts.