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Marriage, Social Distance and the Social Space:

An Alternative Derivation and Validation of the Cambridge Scale

Cardiff University, prandyk{at}cf.ac.uk

Paul Lambert

University of Stirling, LambertP{at}cf.ac.uk

There is a danger that the Cambridge Scale, which is based on data collected thirty years ago, is becoming out of date. This article considers an alternative basis for a social interaction-based social distance scale, that of marriage (or cohabitation) rather than friendship. This has considerable advantages in terms of the ready, low-cost availability of large-scale, representative data (usually from a census). It also makes easily possible the construction of comparable scales for many other countries. The article discusses the theoretical background to the approach and the justification for expecting that marriage and friendship would reflect equivalent structures of stratification arrangements. In order to provide direct comparability, a new scale was constructed, based on 1971 census data and using more satisfactory statistical techniques. Empirical analyses using this measure fully support the argument that this alternative method of deriving a scale leads to essentially the same results as the original. The way is therefore open for an updating of the scale and its extension to a number of other countries, under the generic heading of CAMSIS.

Key Words: Cambridge Scale • CAMSIS • social distance • social interaction • stratification

Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 3, 397-411 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/00380385030373001


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