BSEH SS Sociology cheat sheet

Sociology was named by Auguste Comte in 1838 (Cours de philosophie positive); he proposed a hierarchy of sciences with sociology at the apex as the most complex and particular.

Comte's law of three stages: theological (fetishism, polytheism, monotheism), metaphysical (abstract forces), positive (observation and reasoning); social dynamics studies change, social statics studies order.

Emile Durkheim established sociology as a distinct discipline through rules for the observation of 'social facts' - external, constraining, general phenomena to be explained by other social facts, not psychology.

Max Weber defined sociology as the interpretive understanding (Verstehen) of social action and its causal explanation; ideal types are analytical constructs, not descriptions of reality.

Scope positions: Simmel and Small favoured a 'formal' sociology studying forms of social relationships; Durkheim and Hobhouse favoured a synthetic, encyclopedic scope covering all social institutions.

Sociology versus psychology: psychology studies individual mental processes, sociology studies collective phenomena such as norms, groups, and institutions, and uses social facts as its unit.

Sociology versus social anthropology: anthropology traditionally studied small, preliterate, non-Western communities through fieldwork; sociology studies complex, modern, literate societies, though the division has blurred.

Sociology versus history: history reconstructs unique past events chronologically; sociology seeks generalisable patterns and comparisons across societies, using historical data as raw material.

Sociology versus political science and economics: political science focuses on power, state, and government; economics on production, distribution, and exchange; sociology studies the social context and social relations underlying both.

Society is the web of social relationships; MacIver and Page distinguish society (relationships) from community (a territorial area of common life) and from association (a deliberately formed organisation with a specific purpose).

Community requires territorial locality plus a sense of 'we-feeling'; association requires a specific interest, formal organisation, and voluntary membership; a village is a community, a trade union is an association.

Institution: an established pattern of norms and procedures organised around a basic social need (e.g., family, education, religion); an institution is not the same as a building or an organisation.

Social group criteria: two or more members, interaction, mutual awareness, common interest, and a sense of identity; categories and aggregates lack interaction and are not groups.

Primary versus secondary groups (Cooley): primary groups are small, face-to-face, intimate, and diffuse (family, play group); secondary groups are large, formal, impersonal, and goal-specific (bureaucracy, union).

Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (association) - Tönnies: personal, emotional, traditional ties versus impersonal, rational, contractual ties.

Status: the position an individual occupies in a group; ascribed status is assigned at birth (sex, caste, age), achieved status is earned through effort (occupation, education).

Role: the dynamic, behavioural aspect of status - the expected conduct attached to a position; role conflict arises when expectations of two or more roles clash, role set is the cluster of roles attached to one status.

Linton's distinction: status is the position, role is its performance; a person holds many statuses but enacts many roles, and role is what gives status its meaning in interaction.

Family functions: reproduction, socialisation, economic maintenance, emotional support, and regulation of sexual behaviour; Murdock's universal functions were sexual, reproductive, economic, and educational.

Family types: nuclear (parents and children) versus extended/joint (multiple generations or married siblings sharing a household); patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal residence; patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral descent.

Marriage forms: monogamy (one spouse) versus polygamy; polygyny (one man, several wives) is the commonest polygamous form; polyandry (one woman, several husbands) is rare and associated with scarce resources, e.g., Nair and Tibetan cases.

Marriage rules: endogamy (marriage within one's group - caste endogamy in India), exogamy (marriage outside a group - gotra and clan exogamy), and preferential forms such as cross-cousin marriage.

Kinship: relationships based on blood (consanguineal), marriage (affinal), and adoption; kinship terms may be classificatory (grouping many relatives under one term) or descriptive (distinguishing each relative).

Radcliffe-Brown's approach to kinship: kinship is a system of rights and duties, and the avunculate (mother's brother relationship) illustrates structural-functional analysis of kinship roles.

Durkheim's definition of religion: beliefs and practices relating to sacred things, uniting adherents into a moral community (church); sacred versus profane is the core dichotomy.

Functions of religion: social cohesion and integration, legitimation of norms, consolation and anxiety reduction, and provision of meaning; Malinowski's Trobriand study linked magic and religion to anxiety relief in uncertain activities.

Secularisation refers to the decline of religious authority over social life; Weber's Protestant ethic thesis linked ascetic Protestantism to the rise of rational capitalism.

Culture: the total way of life of a society, including material culture (artefacts, technology) and non-material culture (norms, values, beliefs, symbols, language); Tylor's classic definition lists knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and habit.

Norms are shared expectations of behaviour; folkways are everyday customary usages (Sumner), mores are morally binding norms whose violation brings strong sanction, laws are formally codified and enforced by the state.

Values are abstract ideals about what is desirable (honesty, equality); norms are specific rules derived from values; a norm violation triggers sanctions, which may be positive or negative, formal or informal.

Ethnocentrism is judging other cultures by one's own standards; cultural relativism holds that a culture must be understood in its own terms; xenocentrism overvalues foreign cultures.

Subculture: a distinctive pattern within a larger culture (e.g., youth or occupational subcultures); counterculture: a subculture that rejects core values of the dominant culture.

Socialisation: the lifelong process of learning culture and becoming a functioning member of society; primary socialisation occurs in childhood within the family, secondary socialisation later in school and workplace.

Mead's theory: the self develops through taking the role of the other; the play stage involves significant others, the game stage involves the generalised other; the 'I' is spontaneous, the 'me' is the socially internalised self.

Cooley's looking-glass self: we imagine how others see us, imagine their judgement, and develop self-feeling (pride or mortification) accordingly.

Agents of socialisation: family (primary, emotional), peer group (equal status, adolescence), school (formal, achievement), mass media, workplace, and religion; Freud's id, ego, and superego model links the superego to internalised parental and social norms.

Social structure: the relatively stable pattern of social relationships and positions; statuses and roles are its units, and institutions are its organised clusters; Radcliffe-Brown treated structure as observable social relations, not culture.

Stratification is the ranking of people into hierarchical strata with unequal access to scarce rewards; its three classic bases are class (economic), status (social honour), and power (Weber's three dimensions of stratification).

Functionalist theory (Davis and Moore): stratification is necessary because some positions require scarce talent and long training, and unequal rewards motivate the filling of important roles; critics argue it confuses institutionalised inequality with necessity.

Conflict theory (Marx): class is defined by relation to the means of production (bourgeoisie and proletariat); class consciousness and exploitation are central; stratification reflects power and serves dominant interests.

Slavery, estate (feudal), caste, and class are the main historical systems; caste is closed, ascribed, and endogamous; class is relatively open, achieved, and allows mobility.

Social mobility types: vertical (upward or downward change in rank) versus horizontal (movement between positions of equal rank); intragenerational (within a lifetime) versus intergenerational (across generations).

Structural mobility results from changes in the occupational structure (e.g., expansion of white-collar jobs), not from individual effort; exchange mobility involves individuals trading positions with no net change in the structure.

Indicators of mobility: occupational change, educational attainment, income, and marriage patterns; Sorokin's Social and Cultural Mobility treated mobility as a structural feature of societies.

Social change: alterations in social structure, institutions, and patterns of behaviour over time; it may be gradual (evolution) or abrupt (revolution), planned or unplanned, and is not the same as cultural change alone.

Factors of change: technological innovation, economic forces, demographic shifts, ideology and social movements, education, conflict, and diffusion of culture from other societies.

Evolutionary theories (Comte, Spencer, Morgan, Tylor) see change as movement from simple to complex, from savagery to civilisation; unilinear evolution is criticised for ethnocentric assumptions.

Cyclical theories: Spengler's rise and decline of civilisations, Toynbee's challenge-and-response, and Pareto's circulation of elites treat change as recurrent rather than directional.

Conflict theory (Marx): change arises from contradictions between productive forces and relations of production; class struggle drives historical transformation.

Functionalist theory (Parsons): change is adaptation to disturbances; differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion, and value generalisation describe how systems handle change.

Ogburn's cultural lag: material culture changes faster than non-material culture (norms, values), producing maladjustment and social problems.

Modernisation: movement toward industrial, urban, rational, achievement-oriented society; Srinivas's Sanskritisation and Westernisation describe change within Indian society; diffusion is the spread of traits between cultures.

Varna is the fourfold textual classification (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, plus the excluded Avarna); jati is the actual endogamous local group; varna and jati are not the same.

Caste characteristics: hereditary membership, endogamy, hierarchical ranking, restrictions on commensality and occupation, and purity-pollution ideology; caste is a closed system of stratification.

Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus treats caste as a system of ideas centred on purity and pollution, with the pure ranked above the impure; critics accuse the model of over-emphasising ideology and ignoring power and economic domination.

M.N. Srinivas's concepts: dominant caste (numerically strong and landowning group wielding local power), Sanskritisation (mobility through emulation of higher caste ritual practices), Westernisation, and the 'vertical' versus 'horizontal' dimensions of caste.

Ambedkar analysed caste through the principle of graded inequality and endogamy, and linked untouchability to economic and political exclusion; he favoured annihilation of caste rather than reform of its practices.

Tribe: communities with distinct territory, language, kinship organisation, and often subsistence economy; the Constitution schedules Scheduled Tribes under Article 342; tribe–caste–peasant relations are fluid, as in tribes in transition.

Class in India: agrarian classes, the middle class, and the new middle class; class and caste overlap, and class mobility has increased with education and urbanisation without eliminating caste disadvantage.

Gender: sex is biological, gender is socially constructed; patriarchy is male dominance institutionalised in family, economy, and polity; indicators include sex ratio, female literacy, workforce participation, and the gender pay gap.

Key legal and policy instruments: Article 15 (prohibition of discrimination), Article 17 (abolition of untouchability), Article 46 (promotion of SC/ST interests), reservation policy, the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, and the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961.

Social problem: a condition widely perceived as harmful and requiring collective action; objective conditions plus subjective definition by influential groups are both necessary.

Social control: mechanisms by which society enforces norms; formal controls include law, police, and courts; informal controls include folkways, mores, custom, public opinion, and gossip.

Theories of social control: Ross's Social Control (1901) catalogued control through sympathy, sociability, and the sense of justice; Durkheim linked crime to the reaffirmation of collective conscience; Hirschi's control theory stresses attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

Crime and deviance: Merton's strain theory (conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion) explains deviance as a gap between goals and legitimate means; labelling theory (Becker) treats deviance as a product of societal reaction.

Major Indian social problems: poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, dowry and domestic violence, caste-based discrimination and atrocities, communalism, corruption, child labour, and substance abuse.

Legal responses include the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955, SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, Dowry Prohibition Act 1961, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, and the Juvenile Justice Act.

Juvenile delinquency is linked to family breakdown, peer influence, and poverty; the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 sets the age of juvenility at 18, with special provisions for heinous offences by 16–18 year olds.

Poverty measures: the Tendulkar and Rangarajan committees estimated poverty lines; multidimensional poverty indices now supplement income-based measures, and the poverty line is a relative, debated construct.

Quantitative methods: survey research, structured questionnaires, experiments, and statistical analysis; suited to large samples, measurement, and generalisation.

Qualitative methods: participant observation, in-depth interviews, case study, focus groups, and life histories; suited to meaning, process, and small-scale depth.

Sampling: probability methods (simple random, systematic, stratified, cluster) allow inference to a population; non-probability methods (purposive, quota, snowball, convenience) do not support statistical generalisation.

Reliability is consistency of measurement across repetitions; validity is whether an instrument measures what it claims; a measure can be reliable but invalid, not the reverse.

Ethics of research: informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality, no harm to participants, voluntary participation, and honest reporting; covert observation raises specific ethical problems.

Indian thinkers: G.S. Ghurye wrote Caste and Race in India and was a diffusionist; M.N. Srinivas developed Sanskritisation, dominant caste, and the field-view of Indian society; A.R. Desai applied Marxist analysis to Indian nationalism and social change.

Ambedkar's contributions: caste analysis, annihilation of caste, and drafting of the Constitution; Yogendra Singh analysed modernisation and social change in Indian society; Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus and Marriott's ethnosociology are key debates on caste.

Fieldwork tradition: Srinivas's study of the Coorgs established participant observation in Indian sociology; the village studies of the 1950s–60s (Dube, Marriott, Majumdar) used intensive fieldwork.

Mixed-methods designs combine quantitative and qualitative strands; triangulation uses multiple sources, methods, or investigators to check findings.

Globalisation: growing interdependence of economies and societies through trade, investment, technology, and migration; its effects include flexible labour, outsourcing, and cultural hybridisation.

Digital society issues: social media and identity, misinformation, online harassment, digital divide, and platform labour; these are new empirical fields for sociology.

Environmental sociology: risk society (Beck) links modernisation to manufactured risk; climate change, displacement, and resource conflict are studied as social as well as ecological problems.

Urbanisation: migration to cities, slums, informal housing, and urban governance; urban sociology studies spatial segregation, gentrification, and the informal economy.

Demographic transition: shifts from high birth and death rates to low ones; India's falling fertility, ageing population, and skewed child sex ratio are current policy concerns.

Applications of sociology: policy evaluation, programme design (health, education, rural development), social impact assessment, market and consumer research, HR and organisational studies, and social work.

Public sociology (Burawoy): the discipline's engagement with publics beyond academia, alongside professional, critical, and policy sociology.

Social movements and civil society: new movements around gender, environment, caste, and civil liberties use digital mobilisation and legal strategies; sociology analyses their recruitment, framing, and outcomes.

Sociology was named by Auguste Comte in 1838 (Cours de philosophie positive); he proposed a hierarchy of sciences with sociology at the apex as the most complex and particular.

Comte's law of three stages: theological (fetishism, polytheism, monotheism), metaphysical (abstract forces), positive (observation and reasoning); social dynamics studies change, social statics studies order.

Emile Durkheim established sociology as a distinct discipline through rules for the observation of 'social facts' - external, constraining, general phenomena to be explained by other social facts, not psychology.

Max Weber defined sociology as the interpretive understanding (Verstehen) of social action and its causal explanation; ideal types are analytical constructs, not descriptions of reality.

Scope positions: Simmel and Small favoured a 'formal' sociology studying forms of social relationships; Durkheim and Hobhouse favoured a synthetic, encyclopedic scope covering all social institutions.

Sociology versus psychology: psychology studies individual mental processes, sociology studies collective phenomena such as norms, groups, and institutions, and uses social facts as its unit.

Sociology versus social anthropology: anthropology traditionally studied small, preliterate, non-Western communities through fieldwork; sociology studies complex, modern, literate societies, though the division has blurred.

Sociology versus history: history reconstructs unique past events chronologically; sociology seeks generalisable patterns and comparisons across societies, using historical data as raw material.

Sociology versus political science and economics: political science focuses on power, state, and government; economics on production, distribution, and exchange; sociology studies the social context and social relations underlying both.

Society is the web of social relationships; MacIver and Page distinguish society (relationships) from community (a territorial area of common life) and from association (a deliberately formed organisation with a specific purpose).

Community requires territorial locality plus a sense of 'we-feeling'; association requires a specific interest, formal organisation, and voluntary membership; a village is a community, a trade union is an association.

Institution: an established pattern of norms and procedures organised around a basic social need (e.g., family, education, religion); an institution is not the same as a building or an organisation.

Social group criteria: two or more members, interaction, mutual awareness, common interest, and a sense of identity; categories and aggregates lack interaction and are not groups.

Primary versus secondary groups (Cooley): primary groups are small, face-to-face, intimate, and diffuse (family, play group); secondary groups are large, formal, impersonal, and goal-specific (bureaucracy, union).

Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (association) - Tönnies: personal, emotional, traditional ties versus impersonal, rational, contractual ties.

Status: the position an individual occupies in a group; ascribed status is assigned at birth (sex, caste, age), achieved status is earned through effort (occupation, education).

Role: the dynamic, behavioural aspect of status - the expected conduct attached to a position; role conflict arises when expectations of two or more roles clash, role set is the cluster of roles attached to one status.

Linton's distinction: status is the position, role is its performance; a person holds many statuses but enacts many roles, and role is what gives status its meaning in interaction.

Family functions: reproduction, socialisation, economic maintenance, emotional support, and regulation of sexual behaviour; Murdock's universal functions were sexual, reproductive, economic, and educational.

Family types: nuclear (parents and children) versus extended/joint (multiple generations or married siblings sharing a household); patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal residence; patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral descent.

Marriage forms: monogamy (one spouse) versus polygamy; polygyny (one man, several wives) is the commonest polygamous form; polyandry (one woman, several husbands) is rare and associated with scarce resources, e.g., Nair and Tibetan cases.

Marriage rules: endogamy (marriage within one's group - caste endogamy in India), exogamy (marriage outside a group - gotra and clan exogamy), and preferential forms such as cross-cousin marriage.

Kinship: relationships based on blood (consanguineal), marriage (affinal), and adoption; kinship terms may be classificatory (grouping many relatives under one term) or descriptive (distinguishing each relative).

Radcliffe-Brown's approach to kinship: kinship is a system of rights and duties, and the avunculate (mother's brother relationship) illustrates structural-functional analysis of kinship roles.

Durkheim's definition of religion: beliefs and practices relating to sacred things, uniting adherents into a moral community (church); sacred versus profane is the core dichotomy.

Functions of religion: social cohesion and integration, legitimation of norms, consolation and anxiety reduction, and provision of meaning; Malinowski's Trobriand study linked magic and religion to anxiety relief in uncertain activities.

Secularisation refers to the decline of religious authority over social life; Weber's Protestant ethic thesis linked ascetic Protestantism to the rise of rational capitalism.

Culture: the total way of life of a society, including material culture (artefacts, technology) and non-material culture (norms, values, beliefs, symbols, language); Tylor's classic definition lists knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and habit.

Norms are shared expectations of behaviour; folkways are everyday customary usages (Sumner), mores are morally binding norms whose violation brings strong sanction, laws are formally codified and enforced by the state.

Values are abstract ideals about what is desirable (honesty, equality); norms are specific rules derived from values; a norm violation triggers sanctions, which may be positive or negative, formal or informal.

Ethnocentrism is judging other cultures by one's own standards; cultural relativism holds that a culture must be understood in its own terms; xenocentrism overvalues foreign cultures.

Subculture: a distinctive pattern within a larger culture (e.g., youth or occupational subcultures); counterculture: a subculture that rejects core values of the dominant culture.

Socialisation: the lifelong process of learning culture and becoming a functioning member of society; primary socialisation occurs in childhood within the family, secondary socialisation later in school and workplace.

Mead's theory: the self develops through taking the role of the other; the play stage involves significant others, the game stage involves the generalised other; the 'I' is spontaneous, the 'me' is the socially internalised self.

Cooley's looking-glass self: we imagine how others see us, imagine their judgement, and develop self-feeling (pride or mortification) accordingly.

Agents of socialisation: family (primary, emotional), peer group (equal status, adolescence), school (formal, achievement), mass media, workplace, and religion; Freud's id, ego, and superego model links the superego to internalised parental and social norms.

Social structure: the relatively stable pattern of social relationships and positions; statuses and roles are its units, and institutions are its organised clusters; Radcliffe-Brown treated structure as observable social relations, not culture.

Stratification is the ranking of people into hierarchical strata with unequal access to scarce rewards; its three classic bases are class (economic), status (social honour), and power (Weber's three dimensions of stratification).

Functionalist theory (Davis and Moore): stratification is necessary because some positions require scarce talent and long training, and unequal rewards motivate the filling of important roles; critics argue it confuses institutionalised inequality with necessity.

Conflict theory (Marx): class is defined by relation to the means of production (bourgeoisie and proletariat); class consciousness and exploitation are central; stratification reflects power and serves dominant interests.

Slavery, estate (feudal), caste, and class are the main historical systems; caste is closed, ascribed, and endogamous; class is relatively open, achieved, and allows mobility.

Social mobility types: vertical (upward or downward change in rank) versus horizontal (movement between positions of equal rank); intragenerational (within a lifetime) versus intergenerational (across generations).

Structural mobility results from changes in the occupational structure (e.g., expansion of white-collar jobs), not from individual effort; exchange mobility involves individuals trading positions with no net change in the structure.

Indicators of mobility: occupational change, educational attainment, income, and marriage patterns; Sorokin's Social and Cultural Mobility treated mobility as a structural feature of societies.

Social change: alterations in social structure, institutions, and patterns of behaviour over time; it may be gradual (evolution) or abrupt (revolution), planned or unplanned, and is not the same as cultural change alone.

Factors of change: technological innovation, economic forces, demographic shifts, ideology and social movements, education, conflict, and diffusion of culture from other societies.

Evolutionary theories (Comte, Spencer, Morgan, Tylor) see change as movement from simple to complex, from savagery to civilisation; unilinear evolution is criticised for ethnocentric assumptions.

Cyclical theories: Spengler's rise and decline of civilisations, Toynbee's challenge-and-response, and Pareto's circulation of elites treat change as recurrent rather than directional.

Conflict theory (Marx): change arises from contradictions between productive forces and relations of production; class struggle drives historical transformation.

Functionalist theory (Parsons): change is adaptation to disturbances; differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion, and value generalisation describe how systems handle change.

Ogburn's cultural lag: material culture changes faster than non-material culture (norms, values), producing maladjustment and social problems.

Modernisation: movement toward industrial, urban, rational, achievement-oriented society; Srinivas's Sanskritisation and Westernisation describe change within Indian society; diffusion is the spread of traits between cultures.

Varna is the fourfold textual classification (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, plus the excluded Avarna); jati is the actual endogamous local group; varna and jati are not the same.

Caste characteristics: hereditary membership, endogamy, hierarchical ranking, restrictions on commensality and occupation, and purity-pollution ideology; caste is a closed system of stratification.

Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus treats caste as a system of ideas centred on purity and pollution, with the pure ranked above the impure; critics accuse the model of over-emphasising ideology and ignoring power and economic domination.

M.N. Srinivas's concepts: dominant caste (numerically strong and landowning group wielding local power), Sanskritisation (mobility through emulation of higher caste ritual practices), Westernisation, and the 'vertical' versus 'horizontal' dimensions of caste.

Ambedkar analysed caste through the principle of graded inequality and endogamy, and linked untouchability to economic and political exclusion; he favoured annihilation of caste rather than reform of its practices.

Tribe: communities with distinct territory, language, kinship organisation, and often subsistence economy; the Constitution schedules Scheduled Tribes under Article 342; tribe–caste–peasant relations are fluid, as in tribes in transition.

Class in India: agrarian classes, the middle class, and the new middle class; class and caste overlap, and class mobility has increased with education and urbanisation without eliminating caste disadvantage.

Gender: sex is biological, gender is socially constructed; patriarchy is male dominance institutionalised in family, economy, and polity; indicators include sex ratio, female literacy, workforce participation, and the gender pay gap.

Key legal and policy instruments: Article 15 (prohibition of discrimination), Article 17 (abolition of untouchability), Article 46 (promotion of SC/ST interests), reservation policy, the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, and the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961.

Social problem: a condition widely perceived as harmful and requiring collective action; objective conditions plus subjective definition by influential groups are both necessary.

Social control: mechanisms by which society enforces norms; formal controls include law, police, and courts; informal controls include folkways, mores, custom, public opinion, and gossip.

Theories of social control: Ross's Social Control (1901) catalogued control through sympathy, sociability, and the sense of justice; Durkheim linked crime to the reaffirmation of collective conscience; Hirschi's control theory stresses attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

Crime and deviance: Merton's strain theory (conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion) explains deviance as a gap between goals and legitimate means; labelling theory (Becker) treats deviance as a product of societal reaction.

Major Indian social problems: poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, dowry and domestic violence, caste-based discrimination and atrocities, communalism, corruption, child labour, and substance abuse.

Legal responses include the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955, SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, Dowry Prohibition Act 1961, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, and the Juvenile Justice Act.

Juvenile delinquency is linked to family breakdown, peer influence, and poverty; the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 sets the age of juvenility at 18, with special provisions for heinous offences by 16–18 year olds.

Poverty measures: the Tendulkar and Rangarajan committees estimated poverty lines; multidimensional poverty indices now supplement income-based measures, and the poverty line is a relative, debated construct.

Quantitative methods: survey research, structured questionnaires, experiments, and statistical analysis; suited to large samples, measurement, and generalisation.

Qualitative methods: participant observation, in-depth interviews, case study, focus groups, and life histories; suited to meaning, process, and small-scale depth.

Sampling: probability methods (simple random, systematic, stratified, cluster) allow inference to a population; non-probability methods (purposive, quota, snowball, convenience) do not support statistical generalisation.

Reliability is consistency of measurement across repetitions; validity is whether an instrument measures what it claims; a measure can be reliable but invalid, not the reverse.

Ethics of research: informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality, no harm to participants, voluntary participation, and honest reporting; covert observation raises specific ethical problems.

Indian thinkers: G.S. Ghurye wrote Caste and Race in India and was a diffusionist; M.N. Srinivas developed Sanskritisation, dominant caste, and the field-view of Indian society; A.R. Desai applied Marxist analysis to Indian nationalism and social change.

Ambedkar's contributions: caste analysis, annihilation of caste, and drafting of the Constitution; Yogendra Singh analysed modernisation and social change in Indian society; Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus and Marriott's ethnosociology are key debates on caste.

Fieldwork tradition: Srinivas's study of the Coorgs established participant observation in Indian sociology; the village studies of the 1950s–60s (Dube, Marriott, Majumdar) used intensive fieldwork.

Mixed-methods designs combine quantitative and qualitative strands; triangulation uses multiple sources, methods, or investigators to check findings.

Globalisation: growing interdependence of economies and societies through trade, investment, technology, and migration; its effects include flexible labour, outsourcing, and cultural hybridisation.

Digital society issues: social media and identity, misinformation, online harassment, digital divide, and platform labour; these are new empirical fields for sociology.

Environmental sociology: risk society (Beck) links modernisation to manufactured risk; climate change, displacement, and resource conflict are studied as social as well as ecological problems.

Urbanisation: migration to cities, slums, informal housing, and urban governance; urban sociology studies spatial segregation, gentrification, and the informal economy.

Demographic transition: shifts from high birth and death rates to low ones; India's falling fertility, ageing population, and skewed child sex ratio are current policy concerns.

Applications of sociology: policy evaluation, programme design (health, education, rural development), social impact assessment, market and consumer research, HR and organisational studies, and social work.

Public sociology (Burawoy): the discipline's engagement with publics beyond academia, alongside professional, critical, and policy sociology.

Social movements and civil society: new movements around gender, environment, caste, and civil liberties use digital mobilisation and legal strategies; sociology analyses their recruitment, framing, and outcomes.