In a new paper, Graham Brown and Arnim Langer introduce a general class of social distance measures. They follow the general feeling that many measure of diversity and disparity may be closely related by demonstrating how they are all related. By clarifying how these different measures are related, we should find it easier to choose an appropriate measure for the analysis at hand.
The one thing I’m still not convinced is the title of the paper: While they clearly define what they mean by social distance, my sociological training keeps interfering and social distance doesn’t seem fit to express a characteristic of a society. Perhaps it’s easier to talk of the more concrete instances of ethnic diversity, or income disparity.
Brown, Graham K., and Arnim Langer. 2016. ‘A General Class of Social Distance Measures’. Political Analysis, March, mpw002. doi:10.1093/pan/mpw002.
Didier Ruedin 