As the world turns: Ethno-racial distances after 70 years

In 1925, Emory Bogardus published one of the earliest reports on social distance, examining the opinions of 110 business men and school teachers about 39 ethnic and racial groups. In 1993, we studied the views of 135 middle school teachers, using essentially the same instrument applied to 24 of the same target groups. Comparison of the findings of these two surveys seven decades apart showed that (a) the mean social distances correlated .71 (p < .001); (b) however, the distance values in 1993 were smaller (the grand mean, 1.43) than those in 1925 (3.82; the difference, p < .001); (c) likewise, the 1993 distances were more homogeneous (sd, .28) than those in 1925 (sd, 1.43; the difference, p < .001); (d) nevertheless, the rankings based upon the distance values remained remarkably similar (r, .86, p < .001), the most welcome groups being western and northern Europeans and the least tolerated being Middle Easterners, Orientals, and African-Americans. The same stereotypical attitudes appeared to underlie the stable preferential patterns for differing ethno-racial groups.