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A General Class of Social Distance Measures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Graham K. Brown  and
Arnim Langer
Graham K. Brown*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA 6009, Australia
Arnim Langer
Affiliation:
Centre for Research on Peace and Development, KU Leuven, Leuven 3000, Belgium
*
e-mail: graham.brown@uwa.edu.au
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Abstract

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Measures of diversity and disparity within a population are used for investigating a range of developmental outcomes, but often by employing “off-the-shelf” indicators that may not be theoretically appropriate for the hypotheses under investigation. In this article, we proposed a general class of social distance measures that both enables us to see the conceptual relationship between different existing measures of heterogeneity more clearly and is sufficiently flexible to allow for the development of tailored hypothesis-specific measures. We show how a range of existing aggregate measures of diversity and disparity fit within the general class and demonstrate illustratively how the measure can be used to develop more precise hypothesis-specific measures.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 211 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Authors' note: Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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