In social psychology, polarization is a process that explains how and why individuals that perceive themselves as members of a group with a consolidated identity, tend to reinforce their sense of belonging to that group whenever they meet another group with different characteristics, although as strong as theirs. They do this by making their beliefs grow stronger or developing extremist positions, and by generating, reinforcing, or disseminating stereotypes about the other group.
Is there any instrument to measure the degree of polarization that can be found in a particular circumstance in a particular group?
Please, take into consideration that I am not talking about politics, nor economics. I am trying to focus in social psychology/sociology.
I am not a social psychologist, but I have taught social psychology. (It happens.) You're asking for instruments to measure polarization. But you don't ask individuals "how polarized are you?", you ask members of groups "what do you think about X? You want data on attitudes. You can measure attitudes at multiple points in time to see if attitudes within a group become more extreme after exposure to something that you think ought to make them more extreme, or you can see whether members of a group have more extreme attitudes in locations where they are exposed to others than in locations where they are relatively isolated. You can do this experimentally or in the field. Does that make sense? You formulate a hypothesis about how what should happen to specific attitudes if a polarizing process is at work, and then you collect data to test it. People commonly conduct surveys on racial attitudes, political attitudes, and other types of attitudes, attitudes towards food, and other topics, so it should not be difficult to find something relevant ... though not necessarily something that will translate well to Peru. Here's one resource that might help: http://www.midss.org/. Looking for studies related to the attitudes of interest to you is more likely to be fruitful, however.
Polarization is definitely a multidimensional measure but it would probably start with an index of ideology. "How do you feel about guns, fiscal conservatism," and the like with higher scores indicating more conservative viewpoints and lower scores indicating more liberal viewpoints. Facebook also has some interesting "test your polarization" kinds of tools which could inspire scale development.
We can measure social polarization withe the sociogramme, a sociogram is a diagram of the social links that a person has. The criteria used to establish such a diagram are various: personal relationships, professional relations, communication channels, etc. Jacob Levy Moreno made the presentation in 1933.
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