Answer the following questions in about 150 words each:

(a) What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain. (10 marks)

(b) What is the relationship (similarities and differences) between sociology and hi

Question

Answer the following questions in about 150 words each:

(a) What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain. (10 marks)

(b) What is the relationship (similarities and differences) between sociology and history in terms of their area of study and methodology? Discuss. (10 marks)

(c) What is a variable in social research? What are their different types? Elaborate. (10 marks)

(d) Can Merton's reference group theory be relevant in understanding 'identity making' in digital world? Explain. (10 marks)

(e) Is the social stratification theory gender-blind? Elucidate. (10 marks)

UPSC Answer Check · Accepted Answer

(a) Common sense and sociology. Common sense, or common knowledge, is everyday, pre-reflexive knowledge: practical and particular. It helps people navigate immediate situations, but it tends to be anecdotal, untested, and shaped by personal experience, status and local habit. Sociology, by contrast, is a systematic discipline: it formulates concepts, collects evidence, compares cases and tests explanations. C. Wright Mills sharpened this distinction by separating personal troubles, which appear as private misfortunes, from public issues, which arise when many such troubles are linked to social structures. A woman’s unemployment may look like personal failure, but when mass unemployment follows policy change it becomes a public issue requiring structural explanation. Thus common sense supplies raw material, while sociology converts it into general, evidence-based understanding. The causal mechanism is that sociology asks not only what people feel, but why patterns repeat across groups and institutions. This makes social life intelligible rather than merely familiar.

(b) Sociology and history. Sociology and history overlap because both study social phenomena: institutions, power, change and human action in context. Their difference lies in emphasis and method. History is largely idiographic: it reconstructs unique events, periods and personalities, asking what happened and how a particular sequence unfolded. Sociology is largely nomothetic: it seeks general patterns, causal mechanisms and laws or tendencies that recur across cases. E.H. Carr’s remark that history is the sociology of the past captures the link: historical events can be explained by social structures, while sociological generalisations need historical grounding. In Indian studies, for example, the history of land revenue systems explains particular colonial outcomes, while sociology compares agrarian relations across regions to identify class formation. Methodologically, history leans on archival sources, chronology and contextual interpretation; sociology uses surveys, comparative case studies and conceptual models. Together, history supplies specificity, sociology generalisation.

(c) Variables in social research. A variable in social research is a measurable attribute that can take different values across cases. Its variation allows researchers to test relationships. Variables are commonly classified as independent and dependent: the independent variable is the presumed cause or predictor, while the dependent variable is the outcome being explained. In NSS surveys, education may be independent and income dependent. They are also discrete or continuous: discrete variables take countable values, such as number of children, while continuous variables can take infinitely many values within an interval, such as monthly income measured in rupees. Measurement scales further distinguish nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio variables. Caste is nominal because categories have no fixed rank; education level is ordinal because categories are ranked; IQ scores are interval; income is ratio because it has a true zero. Control variables are held constant to rule out confounding; intervening variables mediate, and moderators condition effects. This typology makes causal claims testable.

(d) Merton and digital identity. Merton’s reference group theory is relevant to identity making in the digital world because identity is formed by comparing oneself with groups that supply standards, norms and aspirations. Reference groups are normative, supplying rules, or comparative, supplying benchmarks. They may be membership or non-membership groups; individuals can use their own membership groups as reference groups, while digital platforms make non-membership groups visible. The causal mechanism is upward comparison: social media displays curated lifestyles, so users measure themselves against influencers or aspirational communities. This can produce relative deprivation, where people feel deprived even when their material position improves, because their reference point has shifted upward. This produces identity work: adopting symbols and politics to belong. In India, platforms amplify caste, class and religious markers, enabling self-representation and status performance. Thus Merton’s theory explains how digital visibility turns comparison into identity.

(e) Gender-blindness in stratification. Classical social stratification theory is often gender-blind because it treated class, status and power as if they operated in a gender-neutral public sphere. Marx, Weber, Dahrendorf and Davis-Moore focused on class, status, power and functional rewards, but all assumed a male worker as default. Feminist critiques of Marx and Dahrendorf show that gender organises access to resources, labour and authority. Ann Oakley showed that class is gendered, because women’s class position is mediated by domestic labour, wage dependence and marriage. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined intersectionality, and Patricia Hill Collins developed the matrix of domination and Black feminist thought, showing that race, class and gender operate together. In India, agrarian studies reveal a caste-class-gender nexus: upper-caste men may own land, while Dalit and Adivasi women may be landless labourers facing unpaid care and exclusion. Thus stratification is gendered, and gender-blind theories miss how hierarchy is reproduced.

Answer the following questions in about 150 words each: (a) What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related…

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