The drawing-a-line method: A new method to measure social distance with a ratio scale

Social distance describes how close an individual feels to another, and it is related to altruism. However, it is typically measured on an ordinal scale, hindering its precision and comparison with other phenomena. Although the open-field procedure effectively converts social distance to a ratio scale, some issues remain. In this study, we developed the drawing-a-line (DLM) method to solve them. We asked participants to identify people in Positions 1, 2, 20, 50, and 100 on their social distance list and to complete a social discounting task. Then, for each person, participants drew a line to represent how close they felt to that person and we calculated the lengths to obtain a social distance value on a ratio scale. Results show that the DLM produced minimal variability in raw social distance at lower positions, reduced the s value in the distance function, and maintained a good fit of the data to the hyperbolic social discounting model. We discuss the results in terms of the strengths of the DLM, the methodological and conceptual significance of the decrement of the s value, and the limitations of the new method.