The Social Distance Attitudes of Chinese Students towards Twenty-five National and Ethnic Groups

Close to forty years have elapsed since Bogardus(3) constructed the first and most widely used Social Distance Scale. During this interval, though numerous studies of social distance and factors affecting it have appeared, most of them have been carried out in the United States. So far as we know, there are only a few studies concerned with social distance attitudes, using peoples other than the Americans as subjects. These studies include those by Dodd(5) and Prothro and Melikian(10) in the Near East, Ansari(2), Adinarayan(1), and Sinha and Upadhyaya(14) in India, Hunt(8) in the Philippines, Pettigrew(9) and van den Berghe(15) in South Africa, and Vaughan(16) in New Zealand. This list is short in comparison with the large number of nations in the world. And this is probably why Sinha and Upadhyaya(13), in a very recent paper, made the following statement: 'But in view of the fact that prejudice, which lies at the root of different kinds of tensions prevailing all over the world, is at least in part revealed in the social distance at which members of one ethnic group hold another and its members, it is necessary that more studies of social distance be done in different cultures' (p. 49).