NCERT Solutions Class 11 Sociology Chapter 2 Terms and Concepts - HD

Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology is the chapter where students lose marks by swapping one definition for its pair. Primary against secondary, ascribed against achieved, formal against informal control. The NCERT Solutions below answer all 5 textbook exercise questions from the 2026-27 Introducing Sociology book, and every answer keeps each pair clearly apart.

• Covers all 5 exercise questions, from why sociology needs its own terms to how status and role change.
• This chapter usually carries 8 to 10 marks in the Class 11 Sociology paper.
• Written according to the 2026-27 NCERT Introducing Sociology book, where this sits as Chapter 2.

Every answer in this Collegedunia compilation is curated by Class 11 Sociology teachers, checked line by line against the 2026-27 NCERT Introducing Sociology print, and refined against the last five years of school question papers.

How Collegedunia's Terms and Concepts Answers Help You Score in Class 11 Sociology

This chapter is built almost entirely out of paired terms. The paper rewards students who can state a definition, then separate it from the term sitting next to it. These solutions are written in that shape, so you can lift a definition straight into the answer sheet.

• Each answer opens with the textbook definition, then adds the example NCERT itself uses, so the examiner sees the source at once.
• Every paired term gets a separating line: primary against secondary, community against association, ascribed against achieved, formal against informal.
• Named sources stay attached to their ideas, so Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Berger, Srinivas, Desai and Nongbri are never swapped around.
• The five exercise questions are open ended, so each answer is written at long answer length with three or four clear points.

Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology Chapter Summary for Class 11

The chapter has one introduction and four content blocks. Knowing which block a question belongs to is half the answer, because each block carries its own set of terms.

Why Sociology Needs Its Own Terms When Everyday Words Already Exist

Exercise question 1 asks this directly, so it is worth getting right. Nuclear physics deals with things no one talks about at home, so nobody questions its vocabulary. Sociology has the opposite problem. Its subject matter is familiar, and ordinary words already exist for it.

Peter Berger makes the point that we are so well acquainted with the social institutions around us that we cannot see them clearly and precisely. Because we live in families, we assume we know all about families. That assumption mixes up sociological knowledge with common sense knowledge, which is the mistake Chapter 1 warned against.

• Concepts carry a history. Many of them came from thinkers trying to map the shift from pre-modern to modern society.
• Small, traditional societies showed close, face-to-face interaction. Large, modern societies showed formal interaction. That contrast produced the primary and secondary group pair.
• Different schools use different keys. For Karl Marx the keys were class and conflict. For Emile Durkheim they were social solidarity and collective conscience.
• Some concepts start from the individual, such as status and role. Others start from a larger setting, such as social control and stratification.

NCERT gives you the image to use in the answer. Concepts are keys that open locks. They are entry points, not final answers. If a key is bent or rusted, sociology changes the key rather than the lock.

Social Groups, Status and Role Explained in One Video

Source: Magnet Brains on YouTube

Aggregates, Quasi Groups and the Six Features of a Social Group

Exercise question 2 asks you to look at your own groups sociologically. The answer has to begin by ruling out the gatherings that are not groups at all.

• Aggregates are collections of people in the same place at the same time who share no definite connection. Passengers waiting at a railway station and people watching a film in a cinema hall are the textbook examples.
• Quasi groups lack structure or organisation, and their members may be unaware, or less aware, of the grouping. Social classes, status groups, age and gender groups and crowds are quasi groups.
• Quasi groups can turn into social groups. Caste and class produced political parties, the anti-colonial struggle produced a nation with a shared past, and the women's movement produced women's organisations.

NCERT then lists six features. Reproduce them as a list, because examiners mark them point by point.

1. Persistent interaction, which gives the group continuity.
2. A stable pattern of those interactions.
3. A sense of belonging, so each member is conscious of the group and of its own rules, rituals and symbols.
4. Shared interest.
5. Acceptance of common norms and values.
6. A definable structure.

Social structure here means patterns of regular and repetitive interaction between individuals or groups. A social group is therefore a collection of continuously interacting persons who share common interest, culture, values and norms within a given society.

Primary and Secondary Groups Compared with the Examples NCERT Uses

This is the pair students reverse most often. The safest way to remember it is by what the group is organised around. A primary group is organised around persons. A secondary group is organised around a goal.

The peer group is a kind of primary group, formed between people of similar age or in a common professional group. Peer pressure is the social pressure your peers exert on what you ought to do or not do, and it is the one term from this section that turns up in one mark questions.

Community and Association, In-Groups, Out-Groups and Reference Groups

The community and association pair sits directly on top of the primary and secondary pair, and NCERT tells you to draw that parallel. Community means human relationships that are highly personal, intimate and enduring, as in the family or a close-knit group. Association means the impersonal, superficial and transitory relationships of modern urban life, where people make contracts instead of getting to know one another.

M.N. Srinivas supplies the evidence for the out-group idea. While taking a census in Rampura in 1948 he heard villagers separate recent immigrants, described as nenne monne bandavartu, meaning came yesterday or the day before, from old immigrants described as arsheyinda bandavaru, meaning came long ago. Quote either phrase and the answer immediately looks sourced.

The reference group answer needs one extra line that students often drop. The colonial emulation was gendered. Indian men often wanted to dress and dine like British men, while expecting Indian women to stay Indian in their ways.

Social Stratification and the Four Historical Systems of Inequality

Exercise question 3 asks what stratification you see around you and how it affects individual lives. Open with the definition, then move to the effects, because the second half carries the marks.

Social stratification refers to structured inequalities between groups in society in terms of their access to material or symbolic rewards. NCERT compares it to the geological layering of rock, with society consisting of strata in a hierarchy, the more favoured at the top and the less privileged near the bottom.

• Stratification is central to sociology because every aspect of the life of every individual and household is affected by it.
• Opportunities for health, longevity, security, educational success, fulfilment in work and political influence are all unequally distributed in systematic ways.

Caste and Class as Two Systems of Stratification in the Class 11 Answer

In a caste system, position depends on status attributes ascribed by birth. Each position in the traditional Indian caste structure was defined by its purity or pollution relative to others. The system is generally conceptualised through the four fold varna of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras, with the Panchamas placed outside it, while in reality there are innumerable occupation based caste groups called jatis.

Change and persistence both belong in the answer. A.R. Desai notes that modern industries brought modern cities with hotels, restaurants, theatres, trams, buses and railways, where people of all castes were crowded together, and yet he adds that caste had not vanished. The mill worker Parmar, quoted from a Dalit narrative, says his colleagues will not drink water from his hands however well he dresses.

Close the comparison with the line NCERT gives you. A caste hierarchy is fixed, rigid and transmitted across generations, while a modern class system is open and achievement based. Nothing legally stops a person from the most deprived class or caste from reaching the highest position, and the life of the late President K.R. Narayanan is the example the book points to. Even so, studies of social mobility stay far from any model of perfect mobility.

Status and Role, Ascribed and Achieved, Status Set and Status Sequence

Exercise question 5 asks you to identify your own roles and status and to say whether they change. Definitions first, then the change.

• Status is simply a position in society or in a group, carrying defined rights and duties. A mother occupies a status with its own norms of conduct, responsibilities and prerogatives.
• Role is the dynamic or behavioural aspect of status. Status is occupied, but roles are played. A status is an institutionalised role, one that has become regularised, standardised and formalised.
• Status set is the collection of positions one person holds at the same time. You may be a student to your teacher, a customer to your grocer, a passenger to the bus driver and a patient to the doctor.
• Status sequence is the set of positions attained one after another. A son becomes a father, then a grandfather, then a great grandfather.

Add the prestige line to finish the answer. Value is attached to the position itself, not to the person filling it or to how well it is filled. The prestige of a doctor may be higher than that of a shopkeeper even when the doctor earns less, and which occupations count as prestigious varies across societies and across periods.

Role Conflict, Role Stereotyping and What the Khasi Example Shows

People perform roles according to social expectations, which sociology calls role taking and role playing. A child learns to behave in line with how that behaviour will be seen and judged by others. Two problems follow from this, and both are examinable.

• Role conflict is the incompatibility among roles corresponding to one or more status. It appears when contrary expectations arise from two or more roles.
• The standard example is the middle class working woman who has to juggle her roles as mother and wife at home with her role as a professional at work.
• Khasi matriliny shows that men face role conflict too. Tiplut Nongbri records that Khasi men are torn between duties to their natal house and duties to their wife and children, and lack the freedom to pass on even self-acquired property to their children.
• Role stereotyping reinforces one fixed role for a section of society, as when men and women are socialised as breadwinner and homemaker.

NCERT then corrects a common assumption. Roles are not simply handed out and absorbed. Socialisation is a process in which humans exercise agency, so people negotiate and shape roles through ongoing social interaction rather than waiting to be programmed.

Society and Social Control, Formal, Informal, Sanctions and Deviance

Exercise question 4 asks what social control is and whether it works differently in different spheres. The definition is short. Social control refers to the various means used by a society to bring its recalcitrant or unruly members back into line. The marks come from the two perspectives and the two types.

• For functionalists, social control means the use of force to regulate behaviour and the enforcing of values and patterns that maintain order. It restrains deviance, eases tension between groups, and is therefore necessary for stability.
• For conflict theorists, social control is a mechanism through which dominant classes impose their control on the rest of society. Stability becomes the writ of one section over another, and law becomes the formal writ of the powerful.

Two terms close the section. A sanction is a mode of reward or punishment that reinforces socially expected behaviour, so it can be positive or negative. Deviance means modes of action that do not conform to the norms or values held by most members of a group or society, and what counts as deviant changes from one culture and one period to another. A woman choosing to become an astronaut may be treated as deviant at one time and applauded at another in the very same society.

Peter Berger adds the line worth quoting. Physical violence is the oldest means of social control, yet in any working society it is used economically and as a last resort, with the mere threat of it enough for day-to-day control.

All 5 Textbook Questions Covered in These Terms and Concepts NCERT Solutions

Every exercise question here is open ended, so none of them has a one line answer. Use the table to see which section of the chapter each question draws on before you start writing.

How Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology Appears in the Class 11 Exam Paper

This chapter behaves like a definitions bank. Short questions come from single terms, and the long question usually comes from stratification or social control. Here is where it sits against the rest of the Class 11 Sociology course.

Because Chapter 6 of the course carries stratification forward, the definitions you fix here are reused later in the year. Learning them properly once saves you a second round of revision.

Common Mistakes Students Make in the Terms and Concepts Chapter

Sample Solved Long Answer on Social Control for the Class 11 Sociology Exam

Here is exercise question 4 written the way a marker wants to read it. Notice how each step is a separate short paragraph, so the examiner can tick as she goes.

1. Definition. Social control refers to the various means a society uses to bring its unruly members back into line, and to the social processes, techniques and strategies through which the behaviour of an individual or a group is regulated.
2. The two perspectives. Functionalists see it as the use of force plus the enforcing of values that maintain order, and therefore as necessary for stability. Conflict theorists see it as a way for dominant classes to impose their control, with law as the formal writ of the powerful.
3. Yes, the modes differ by sphere. Formal control is codified and official, carried by law and the state, and modern societies lean on it. Informal control is personal and uncodified, carried by family, religion and kinship.
4. Give the examples. Courts and the police on the formal side. Smiles, frowns, ridicule, criticism and laughter on the informal side, which work quietly but effectively every day.
5. Close with sanction and deviance. A sanction rewards expected behaviour or punishes deviance, and deviance itself is whatever fails to match the norms most members hold, so it shifts across cultures and periods.

Key Terms from the Terms and Concepts Glossary Every Class 11 Student Should Know

The glossary at the end of the chapter is a ready-made source of one mark answers. Learn these in the book's own words.

How to Study Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology for the 2026-27 Class 11 Exam

This chapter rewards sorting more than reading time. Three short sittings are enough if you use them as described below.

1. Sitting one, build the pair cards. One card per pair: primary and secondary, community and association, in-group and out-group, ascribed and achieved, formal and informal. Definition on the front, NCERT example on the back.
2. Sitting two, learn the two lists. The six features of a social group and the four systems of stratification. These are the lists examiners mark point by point.
3. Sitting three, write two long answers. Attempt exercise questions 3 and 4 without the book, then check them against the solutions on this page.
4. Before the paper, revise the glossary and the named sources. Berger, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Srinivas, Desai and Nongbri cover nearly every one and two mark question in this chapter.

Terms and Concepts Class 11 Sociology Resources Beyond These NCERT Solutions

Also Check: use these alongside the solutions. The handwritten notes work the night before the paper, and the question set lets you attempt each exercise question before reading the answer.

NCERT Solutions for All Class 11 Sociology Chapters

Related Links: the same answer format runs across every chapter of Class 11 Sociology, so you can move from one to the next without changing how you write. Chapters 1 to 5 come from Introducing Sociology and chapters 6 to 10 come from Understanding Society.