RBSE SS Sociology flashcards
RBSE SS Sociology · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Social fact
- Durkheim's term for ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise coercive power over them, such as law, language and suicide rates.
- Verstehen
- Weber's method of interpretive understanding, in which the sociologist grasps the subjective meaning that actors attach to their own social action.
- Role conflict
- A situation in which the expectations attached to two or more roles held by the same person make incompatible demands, such as those of work and family.
- Patrilineal descent
- A kinship rule tracing descent and inheritance through the male line, so that children belong to the father's lineage rather than the mother's.
- Polyandry
- A form of marriage in which one woman is married to two or more men at the same time, often associated with fraternal arrangement in parts of the Himalayas.
- Affinal kinship
- Kinship relations established through marriage rather than blood, covering in-laws such as a spouse's parents, siblings and their relatives.
- Cultural lag
- Ogburn's concept describing the delay between rapid change in material culture and the slower adjustment of non-material culture such as norms and values.
- Looking-glass self
- Cooley's idea that self-concept develops through imagining how others perceive us, how they judge us, and the resulting feeling of pride or shame.
- Generalised other
- Mead's term for the internalised attitudes of the wider community, which the child learns to take into account when evaluating its own conduct.
- Master status
- A status that overrides other statuses in shaping how a person is perceived and treated, such as gender, caste or a visible disability.
- Dominant caste
- M.N. Srinivas's term for a caste numerically strong, economically and politically powerful, and ritually high in a particular local village setting.
- Intergenerational mobility
- Change in social status between parents and their children, measured by comparing the occupation or class of successive generations.
- Status inconsistency
- A Weberian condition in which a person ranks high on one dimension of stratification, such as education, but low on another, such as income.
- Sanskritisation
- M.N. Srinivas's concept for a low caste adopting the rituals, diet and customs of a higher caste in order to claim improved ritual status.
- Acculturation
- The change in culture and behaviour that results when two distinct cultural groups come into sustained first-hand contact with each other.
- Modernisation
- A process of social change involving industrialisation, urbanisation and the spread of achievement-based, rational and secular orientations in institutions.
- Jajmani system
- A traditional Indian village system of hereditary patron-client exchange in which occupational castes provide goods and services to landowning households in return for grain.
- Purity and pollution
- Dumont's principle that ritual ideas of purity and pollution order caste hierarchy, ranking groups by their relative distance from the pure Brahmin ideal.
- Patriarchy
- A system of male dominance embedded in family, economy, polity and culture that subordinates women and shapes gendered access to resources.
- Dowry
- Property, cash or goods given by the bride's family to the groom's family at marriage, prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961.
- Domestic violence
- Physical, sexual, verbal, emotional or economic abuse within a household, addressed by the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005.
- Social legislation
- Laws enacted to remedy social problems and protect vulnerable groups, such as those dealing with dowry, child marriage and workplace harassment.
- Chipko movement
- A non-violent Indian environmental movement in the Himalayan region in which villagers, especially women, hugged trees to prevent commercial felling.
- New social movements
- Movements organised around identity, environment, gender and human rights rather than class interests, using networks and cultural politics.
- Displacement
- The forced relocation of people from land taken for dams, mines or infrastructure, raising issues of compensation, rehabilitation and livelihood loss.
- Latent function
- Merton's term for the unintended and often unrecognised consequences of a social institution or action, as distinct from its stated purpose.
- Dramaturgy
- Goffman's perspective treating social interaction as theatrical performance, with front-stage and back-stage regions and deliberate impression management.
- Ideal type
- Weber's analytical construct formed by accentuating selected features of reality to compare with actual cases; it is not a description or an average.
- Operational definition
- A specification of how a concept will be measured in research, such as defining poverty by income below a stated threshold.
- Participant observation
- A qualitative method in which the researcher joins a group in its natural setting over time to understand its practices from within.
- Triangulation
- The use of multiple methods, data sources or researchers to study the same phenomenon, thereby strengthening the credibility of findings.
- Reliability
- The consistency of a measurement instrument, meaning that repeated applications under the same conditions yield the same results.