RBSE SS Sociology key terms

The systematic study of human social life, groups, and societies, focusing on how social relationships, institutions, and structures shape behaviour and how individuals in turn reproduce or change them.

C. Wright Mills's idea that personal troubles must be understood as connected to public issues, linking an individual's biography to the wider historical and structural arrangements of society.

The relatively stable pattern of social relationships, roles, and institutions that organises interaction and distributes positions and resources across a society over time.

An established, enduring complex of norms, roles, and procedures organised around a basic social need, such as the family, education, religion, economy, or polity.

A socially recognised group based on kinship ties, usually involving adults who cooperate in raising children, and taking nuclear or extended forms across societies.

A household unit consisting of a married couple and their dependent children, typically residing separately from wider kin and common in industrialised urban settings.

A family form in which two or more related generations or married siblings share a household or maintain close joint obligations, common in many agrarian and Indian settings.

A household in which parents, their married sons, and grandchildren live together, sharing property, residence, and a common kitchen under recognised authority, often the eldest male.

A socially sanctioned union between partners that establishes rights and obligations, legitimises sexual relations, and typically defines the social status of children.

The network of social relationships derived from descent, marriage, and adoption, which defines rights, obligations, and patterns of mutual support among relatives.

The rule requiring marriage within a defined social group, such as a caste, clan, or religious community, thereby maintaining group boundaries and identity.

The rule requiring marriage outside a defined social group, such as a clan or lineage, which prevents close intermarriage and creates alliances between groups.

The shared set of beliefs, values, norms, symbols, language, and material objects that members of a society learn, use, and transmit across generations.

A shared expectation about appropriate behaviour in a given situation, ranging from everyday folkways to strongly enforced mores and formal legal rules.

A reward or punishment applied by others to encourage conformity with norms, ranging from informal approval or disapproval to formal legal penalties.

William Ogburn's concept describing the delay between rapid change in material culture, such as technology, and slower adjustment of non-material beliefs and norms.

The tendency to judge other cultures by the standards of one's own, treating one's own beliefs and practices as normal and others as inferior or strange.

The methodological stance of understanding a culture's beliefs and practices in terms of its own context and meanings rather than judging them by outside standards.

The lifelong process through which individuals learn the norms, values, skills, and identities of their society, beginning in childhood and continuing through adult roles.

The groups and institutions that transmit culture and teach social roles, including the family, school, peer group, workplace, religion, and mass media.

A social position occupied by an individual within a group or society, which may be ascribed at birth or achieved through effort, and which carries expectations of behaviour.

The set of expected behaviours, rights, and obligations attached to a particular social status, which guides how a person is expected to act in that position.

The strain experienced when the demands of two or more roles held by the same person make incompatible claims on time, loyalty, or behaviour.

The hierarchical arrangement of social groups into ranked layers with unequal access to valued resources, power, and prestige, persisting across generations.

Movement of individuals or groups between social positions in a stratification system, either upward or downward, within a generation or across generations.

A form of stratification based on economic position and market situation rather than birth, allowing, in principle, greater mobility than caste or estate systems.

A hereditary, endogamous, and hierarchically ranked social group in South Asia, traditionally linked to occupation and ritual purity, with membership fixed by birth.

M. N. Srinivas's term for the process by which a lower caste adopts the rituals, customs, and lifestyle of a higher caste in order to claim improved ritual status.

The historical practice of treating certain castes as ritually polluting and excluding them from temples, wells, and social contact, now prohibited by Indian law.

A social group sharing descent, territory, language, and culture, often with distinctive political organisation and economy, recognised as a Scheduled Tribe category in India.

The socially constructed roles, expectations, and identities associated with being male or female, which vary across cultures and change over historical time.

A system of social relations in which men hold dominant authority in family, economy, and polity, and which subordinates women in public and private spheres.

The transfer of money or goods from the bride's family to the groom's family at marriage, a custom linked to women's unequal status and prohibited by Indian law.

Significant alteration over time in the structure, culture, and institutions of a society, occurring through evolutionary, revolutionary, or gradual processes.

A process of social, economic, and cultural transformation involving industrialisation, urbanisation, rationalisation, and the spread of achievement-based values and institutions.

An organised, sustained collective effort by a group to promote or resist change in social arrangements, values, or policies, often outside established institutional channels.

Laws enacted to address social problems and promote welfare or equality, such as measures on dowry, child marriage, untouchability, and domestic violence in India.

A condition widely regarded as harmful to society and requiring collective action, such as poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, gender violence, or caste discrimination.

A field research method in which the researcher takes part in the daily activities of a group while observing them, gaining access to meanings from an insider's perspective.

First-hand research conducted in a natural setting over an extended period, gathering data through observation, interviews, and documents to understand social life in context.

Max Weber's interpretive method of understanding social action by grasping the subjective meanings that actors themselves attach to their behaviour.

Max Weber's unit of sociological analysis: behaviour to which an actor attaches subjective meaning and which is oriented towards the actions of others.

Émile Durkheim's term for a condition of normlessness in which social expectations become unclear, weakening social cohesion and leaving individuals without moral guidance.