NCERT Solutions for Class 11 Sociology Chapter 5: Doing Sociology – Research Methods (NCERT 2026–27)
These Class 11 Sociology Chapter 5 solutions cover Doing Sociology: Research Methods from the NCERT textbook Introducing Sociology, updated for the 2026–27 session. The chapter explains why method is so important in sociology, the special problems of objectivity and subjectivity in the social sciences, the idea of reflexivity, and the three major field-based and macro methods sociologists use — participant observation, the survey and the interview. Below you get exam-ready, step-by-step answers to all 10 NCERT Exercises, clear notes on key terms, extra practice, MCQs, Assertion–Reason questions and FAQs.
Chapter 5, Doing Sociology: Research Methods, asks what makes a sociologist a social scientist. The answer lies not in what sociologists know but in how they acquire knowledge — their method. Because sociologists study the social world they themselves live in, achieving objectivity is harder than in the natural sciences: there is the problem of bias, the existence of multiple truths and competing interpretations, and the fact that sociology is a multi-paradigmatic science. To guard against bias, sociologists practise reflexivity (self-reflexivity) and carefully document their procedures and sources. The chapter then surveys the main methods that produce primary data — participant observation (field work), pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski and central to social anthropology and Indian village studies; the survey, a macro method relying on sampling theory, stratification and randomisation; and the interview, a flexible guided conversation — weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Key Concepts & Terms
Method & methodology:Method is the procedure through which knowledge is gathered; methodology is the study of method — the general problems of scientific knowledge-gathering that go beyond any single technique.
Objectivity: being unbiased and neutral, producing knowledge based solely on facts. In sociology it is best understood as the goal of a continuous, ongoing process rather than an already achieved end result.
Subjectivity: something based on individual values, feelings and preferences rather than facts alone.
Reflexivity (self-reflexivity): the researcher’s ability to constantly observe and analyse her own ideas, feelings and social background, looking at her own work through the eyes of others to guard against bias.
Multi-paradigmatic science: a discipline in which competing and mutually incompatible schools of thought coexist; sociology is one such science, so there are multiple perspectives and multiple methods.
Quantitative vs qualitative methods: quantitative methods deal with countable or measurable variables (proportions, averages); qualitative methods deal with hard-to-measure phenomena like attitudes, emotions and meanings.
Primary vs secondary data: primary data is fresh data the researcher generates (interviews, surveys, field work); secondary data already exists in documents, archives, records and artefacts.
Micro vs macro methods: micro methods (interview, participant observation) work in small intimate settings usually with a single researcher; macro methods (survey research) tackle large numbers of respondents.
Participant observation (field work): a method in which the sociologist or social anthropologist lives among the people studied for a long period (often a year or more), learns their language and participates in their everyday life to learn their ‘whole way of life’.
Genealogy: an extended family tree outlining familial relations across generations; an important early field-work technique for understanding a community’s kinship system.
Census: a comprehensive survey covering every single member of a population (India’s census is conducted every ten years).
Survey, sample & population: a survey gives a wide-ranging overview from a carefully chosen representative sample (a small subset) of a larger population; respondents answer the researchers’ questions.
Stratification (statistical): dividing a population into distinct sub-groups (strata) based on relevant criteria so that all relevant strata are represented in the sample.
Randomisation & probability: ensuring the actual unit chosen for the sample depends purely on chance; probability is the likelihood of an event occurring.
Sampling (margin of) error: the unavoidable, specifiable margin of error that arises because a survey uses a small sample to stand for a large population; non-sampling errors arise from faults in design or implementation.
Interview: a guided conversation between researcher and respondent, lying between the structured survey questionnaire and the open-ended interactions of participant observation; its chief advantage is flexibility.
NCERT “Exercises” — Full Solutions
All questions below are reproduced verbatim from the NCERT textbook’s end-of-chapter Exercises section. Answers are original, written in exam-ready style.
1. Why is the question of a scientific method particularly important in sociology?
ANSWERMethod is particularly important in sociology for several reasons. First, sociology deals with things that are already familiar to people — social groups, institutions, norms and relationships — which all of us know something about through our own experience. So what makes a sociologist a social scientist is not how much she knows or what she knows, but how she acquires her knowledge. The crucial element that distinguishes the sociologist from a lay person is method — the systematic procedure through which knowledge is gathered.Second, sociology is interested in the lived experience of people. It wants to know not only what an outside observer can see, but also the opinions, feelings and meanings of the people involved — what friendship means in different cultures, what a worshipper feels during a ritual, how a shopkeeper and customer interpret each other while bargaining. The need to understand both the outsider’s and the insider’s points of view makes a careful, well-thought-out method especially necessary.
2. What are some of the reasons for ‘objectivity’ being more complicated in social sciences, particularly disciplines like sociology?
ANSWERObjectivity means producing unbiased knowledge based solely on facts, by setting aside one’s own feelings and attitudes. This is much harder in sociology than in the natural sciences, for several reasons:(i) The social scientist is part of what she studies. Unlike a geologist studying rocks or a botanist studying plants, the sociologist studies the social world of human relations in which she herself lives, which creates special problems for objectivity.(ii) The problem of bias. Being members of society, sociologists have the normal likes and dislikes that everyone has. A sociologist studying family relations is herself part of a family; even without direct personal experience of a group, she may be affected by the values and prejudices of her own social context (for example, attitudes about another caste or religious community).(iii) Multiple versions of the ‘truth’. In the social world things look different from different vantage points; a shopkeeper and a customer, or a young and an old person, may have very different ideas about a ‘good’ price or ‘good’ food. There is no simple way of judging which interpretation is true.(iv) Sociology is multi-paradigmatic. Competing and mutually incompatible schools of thought coexist within the discipline itself. For these reasons the old notion of an ‘objective, disinterested’ social science is now considered outdated; objectivity is treated as the goal of an ongoing process, not an already achieved result.
3. How do sociologists try to deal with difficulties in “objectivity” and strive for objectivity?
ANSWERSociologists use several strategies to guard against bias and strive for objectivity:(i) Self-reflexivity. They rigorously and continuously examine their own ideas and feelings about the subject of research, trying to take an outsider’s perspective on their own work — looking at themselves and their research through the eyes of others, especially the people they study.(ii) Careful documentation. They document all procedures and formally cite all sources of evidence, so that others can retrace the steps taken to reach a conclusion and check whether the researcher is right. This also helps the researcher check and re-check her own line of argument.(iii) Declaring possible sources of bias. Because unconscious bias is always possible, sociologists explicitly mention features of their own social background that might be a source of bias on the topic, alerting readers so they can mentally ‘compensate’ for it.(iv) Treating objectivity as a process. They accept that objectivity is the goal of a continuous, ongoing process rather than a finished end-result, and they often advocate using multiple methods (triangulation) to approach the same problem from different directions.
4. What is meant by ‘reflexivity’ and why is it important in sociology?
ANSWERReflexivity (or self-reflexivity) is the technique by which the sociologist tries to take an outsider’s perspective on her own work — she constantly subjects her own attitudes and opinions to self-examination, and consciously tries to adopt the point of view of others, especially the subjects of her research.Why it is important: (i) Since the sociologist is a member of the very society she studies, she is liable to bias; reflexivity is a key way of recognising and controlling that bias. (ii) A practical aspect of reflexivity is the careful documentation of everything one does and the citing of all sources, which lets others retrace and verify the research and helps the researcher re-check her own reasoning. (iii) It strengthens the claim of sociology to be a rigorous, trustworthy science, because conclusions can be examined and corrected by others. In short, reflexivity is the main safeguard sociology has against the bias that comes from studying one’s own social world.
5. What are some of the things that ethnographers and sociologists do during participant observation?
ANSWERDuring participant observation (field work), ethnographers and sociologists typically do the following:(i) Live among the people. They spend a long period — often about a year or more — living among the people being studied as one of them, immersing themselves in the culture, learning the local language and participating intimately in everyday life.(ii) Conduct a census. They usually begin by making a detailed list of all the people in the community, recording information such as sex, age group and family, and may map the physical layout of the village or settlement.(iii) Construct a genealogy. They build family trees for individual members, extending them back over as many generations as people can remember, and cross-check information by asking different relatives the same questions — this helps them understand the community’s kinship system.(iv) Observe and ask endless questions. They observe festivals, religious or collective events, modes of earning a living, family relations and child-rearing, asking questions about things community members take for granted — learning ‘like a child’.(v) Rely on informants and keep field notes. They depend on one or two ‘principal informants’ who act as their teachers, and keep detailed field notes (often a daily diary) that must be written up every day without fail.
6. What are the strengths and weaknesses of participant observation as a method?
ANSWERStrengths:(i) It provides a very rich and detailed picture of life from the perspective of the ‘insider’ — its greatest return on the investment of time and effort.(ii) Because the researcher stays in the field over a long period, the method allows the correction of initial impressions that may be mistaken or biased.(iii) It permits the researcher to track changes and to see the impact of different situations or contexts (for example, behaviour in a good versus a bad harvest year), helping avoid many errors that surveys and short-term observation are prone to.Weaknesses:(i) Field work is long, intensive and usually done by a single scholar alone, so it can only cover a very small part of the world — generally a single village or small community. We can never be sure whether what was observed is common or exceptional.(ii) We are never sure whether we are hearing the voice of the people or of the researcher, since the anthropologist selects what to record and how to present it — so there is always a chance of bias or error.(iii) The method is criticised for being based on a one-sided relationship in which the researcher asks the questions, presents the answers and speaks for ‘the people’; some scholars therefore suggest more ‘dialogic’ formats that involve the respondents more directly.
7. What are the basic elements of the survey method? What is chief advantage of this method?
ANSWERBasic elements of the survey method:(i) A survey is an attempt to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of a subject based on information from a carefully chosen, representative set of people called respondents.(ii) It is usually carried out by large teams — the researchers who plan and design the study and their associates/assistants (called investigators or research assistants).(iii) Questions may be asked orally during personal visits, by telephone, in written questionnaires (the ‘survey instrument’), by post, or electronically (email/Internet).(iv) It depends on selecting a representative sample using sampling theory, with the two key principles of stratification (representing all relevant sub-groups) and randomisation (choosing the actual unit purely by chance).Chief advantage: the survey allows us to generalise results to a large population while actually studying only a small portion of it, so it makes it possible to study large populations with a manageable investment of time, effort and money.
8. Describe some of the criteria involved in selecting a representative sample.
ANSWERSelecting a representative sample depends mainly on two principles:(i) Stratification. All the relevant sub-groups (strata) in the population should be recognised and represented in the sample. Most large populations are not homogeneous — they are divided into distinct categories such as rural and urban, or by class, caste, gender, age and religion. A sample is representative only if it reflects the characteristics of all the relevant strata. Which strata are relevant depends on the objective of the study (for example, including members of all religions when researching attitudes towards religion).(ii) Randomisation. After the relevant strata are identified, the actual unit chosen — person, household or village — should be selected purely by chance, based on the concept of probability. Being in the sample should be a matter of luck, like winning a lottery. This is ensured by techniques such as drawing lots, rolling dice, using random number tables, or random numbers generated by calculators or computers. If a team picks only villages near a highway, or mostly middle-class or familiar households, the sample becomes purposive, not random, and therefore not representative.When reporting results, researchers must also specify the size and design of the sample and the margin of error; the larger the sample, the greater its chance of being truly representative.
9. State some of the weaknesses of the survey method.
ANSWERThe survey method has several weaknesses:(i) Wide coverage at the cost of depth. Because there are many respondents, the time spent on each must be limited, so it is usually not possible to get in-depth information.(ii) Errors from many investigators. Since the questionnaire is taken around by a large number of investigators, it is hard to ensure that complicated questions are asked of everyone in exactly the same way; differences in asking questions or recording answers can introduce errors.(iii) No trust or rapport. There is no long-term relationship between investigator and respondent, so personal or sensitive questions cannot be asked, or are answered ‘safely’ rather than truthfully — these are ‘non-sampling errors’ due to faults in design or implementation.(iv) Inflexible instrument. A survey depends on a tightly structured, inflexible questionnaire that cannot easily be corrected or modified once it is in use, and its success finally depends on the goodwill and cooperation of respondents. As a result, surveys can sometimes go wrong and produce misleading or false estimates.
10. Describe main features of the interview as a research method.
ANSWERThe main features of the interview as a research method are:(i) A guided conversation. An interview is basically a guided conversation between the researcher and the respondent. Though it has few technicalities, becoming a good interviewer takes a lot of practice and skill.(ii) An in-between position. It occupies the ground between the structured questionnaire used in surveys and the completely open-ended interactions of participant observation.(iii) Flexibility — its chief advantage. Questions can be re-phrased; the order of subjects can be changed according to the progress of the conversation; productive lines can be extended and unfavourable ones cut short or postponed — all during the interview itself.(iv) Related disadvantages. The same flexibility makes the interview unstable and unpredictable — vulnerable to the respondent’s changes of mood or the interviewer’s lapses of concentration; “it works very well when it works, and fails miserably when it doesn’t.”(v) Styles and recording. Interviewing styles range from a loose check-list of topics to a fixed set of questions; recording may be by audio/video, detailed note-taking, or writing up from memory afterwards. The interview is often used to supplement other methods such as participant observation and surveys, but depends on personalised access and the rapport or mutual trust between respondent and researcher.
Extra Practice Questions
Short Answer Type Questions
Q1. Distinguish between ‘method’ and ‘methodology’.
ANSWERA method is the actual procedure or technique through which knowledge is gathered, such as a survey or an interview. Methodology is the study of method — it deals with the general problems of scientific knowledge-gathering that go beyond any single method, technique or procedure.
Q2. What is meant by ‘triangulation’?
ANSWERTriangulation is the use of multiple methods to study the same research problem from different vantage points — a process of pinpointing something from different directions. Different methods complement each other to produce a much better result than any single method could on its own.
Q3. Why is sociology called a ‘multi-paradigmatic’ science?
ANSWERSociology is multi-paradigmatic because competing and mutually incompatible schools of thought coexist within it. There is no single agreed theory of society; this is one reason there are multiple perspectives and, consequently, multiple methods in the discipline, and why objectivity is complicated.
Q4. Who established field work as the distinctive method of social anthropology, and where?
ANSWERBronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist settled in Britain, is widely believed to have established field work as the distinctive method of social anthropology. He spent about a year and a half living in the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific, learning the local language and observing the natives, and campaigned for field work to be a compulsory part of anthropological training.
Q5. Why did village studies become important in Indian sociology in the 1950s?
ANSWERThe village acted as the equivalent of the tribal community studied by earlier anthropologists — a small, ‘bounded community’ that a single sociologist could study. Above all, villages were where most Indians lived; newly independent India was keen on rural development and ‘village uplift’, and many educated Indians retained links to villages. Field work methods were very well suited to studying village society.
Long Answer Type Questions
Q1. Explain the different ways in which sociological research methods are classified.
ANSWERThere is no single road to sociological truth, so methods are classified in several conventional ways. First, methods are distinguished as quantitative (dealing with countable or measurable variables like proportions and averages) versus qualitative (dealing with hard-to-measure things like attitudes, emotions and meanings); a related distinction is between methods that study observable behaviour and those that study non-observable meanings and values. Second, methods are classified by the kind of data they use: those relying on secondary data already existing in documents, archives and records (such as historical methods) versus those designed to produce fresh primary data (such as interviews). Third, methods are separated into micro methods, which work in small, intimate settings usually with a single researcher (interview, participant observation), and macro methods, which handle large numbers of respondents (survey research). It is important to remember that these dividing lines are matters of convention and need not be sharp — one kind of method can often be converted into or supplemented by another, which is why triangulation is increasingly advocated.
Q2. Describe the role of field work in establishing social anthropology as a science, with reference to Malinowski.
ANSWERField work as a rigorous scientific method played a major role in establishing anthropology as a social science. The early anthropologists were ‘armchair scholars’ who organised second-hand information about distant communities collected by travellers, missionaries and colonial administrators — James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Durkheim’s work on primitive religion were based entirely on such accounts. Towards the end of the 19th century, reliance on second-hand reports came to be seen as unscholarly, and first-hand observation grew in prestige. Bronislaw Malinowski is widely credited with establishing field work as the distinctive method of the discipline. Interned as an ‘enemy alien’ during the First World War, he served his internment in the Trobriand Islands, living in a tent in the native villages for about a year and a half, learning the local language and interacting closely with the natives while keeping careful records and a daily diary. He was convinced that anthropology would remain a mere hobby unless its practitioners did systematic first-hand observation, in context, without interpreters. His position at the London School of Economics let him campaign for field work to become a mandatory part of anthropological training, which helped the discipline gain acceptance as a rigorous science. Since the 1920s, participant observation has been the principal method through which anthropological knowledge is produced.
Q3. Compare participant observation and the survey as methods of sociological research.
ANSWERParticipant observation is a micro, largely qualitative method in which a single researcher lives among a small community for a long period (often a year or more), learning its language and way of life, and producing primary data through field notes, genealogies and a census. Its great strength is a rich, detailed, insider’s picture and the ability to correct initial impressions and track change over time; its weaknesses are that it covers only a tiny part of the world, depends heavily on a single researcher’s selection of what to record (risking bias), and rests on a one-sided relationship. The survey, by contrast, is a macro, largely quantitative method carried out by large teams using structured questionnaires on a carefully chosen representative sample selected through stratification and randomisation. Its great strength is that it can generalise to a large population while studying only a small portion, at a manageable cost of time and money, giving an aggregated picture that reveals problems (like the falling sex ratio) invisible at the individual level; its weaknesses are shallow depth of coverage, errors from many investigators, lack of rapport with respondents, and dependence on a rigid questionnaire. In short, participant observation trades breadth for depth, while the survey trades depth for breadth — which is why sociologists increasingly combine methods through triangulation.
MCQs & Assertion–Reason
1. What chiefly distinguishes the sociologist from a lay person?
(a) how much they know (b) what they know (c) how they acquire their knowledge (d) where they live
2. ‘Methodology’ actually refers to:
(a) a single technique (b) the study of method (c) data collection (d) statistics only
3. The researcher’s ability to observe and analyse oneself is called:
9. The chief advantage of the survey method is that it:
(a) gives the deepest information about each person (b) generalises to a large population from a small sample (c) needs no questionnaire (d) requires only one researcher
10. The chief advantage of the interview as a research method is its:
(a) rigidity (b) flexibility (c) large sample size (d) use of secondary data
For each Assertion–Reason question, choose: (A) Both true and the Reason correctly explains the Assertion; (B) Both true but the Reason is not the correct explanation; (C) Assertion true, Reason false; (D) Assertion false, Reason true.
A-R 1. Assertion: Objectivity is harder to achieve in sociology than in the natural sciences.
Reason: Social scientists study the social world in which they themselves live.
A-R 2. Assertion: Sociologists explicitly mention features of their own social background in their research.
Reason: This alerts readers to possible bias and lets them mentally compensate for it.
A-R 3. Assertion: Participant observation can cover very large populations easily.
Reason: Field work is long, intensive and usually done by a single scholar working alone.
A-R 4. Assertion: A sample chosen only from villages near a highway is a representative sample.
Reason: A representative sample requires that the actual unit be selected purely by chance.
A-R 5. Assertion: The interview is described as an unstable and unpredictable format.
Reason: Its flexibility makes it vulnerable to the respondent’s changes of mood and the interviewer’s lapses of concentration.
Answer key: 1-(A), 2-(A), 3-(D), 4-(D), 5-(A).
Exam Tips & Common Mistakes
How to score full marks in this chapter
Learn the precise definitions in the glossary — census, genealogy, non-sampling error, population, probability, questionnaire, randomisation, reflexivity, sample, sampling error and stratification — and be able to give one-line examples. For ‘strengths and weaknesses’ questions on participant observation, the survey and the interview, write a clear two-sided structure. Always remember the two principles of representative sampling (stratification + randomisation) and explain objectivity as the goal of an ongoing process rather than a finished result. Use named examples from the chapter — Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, M.N. Srinivas’s The Remembered Village, William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society, and the National Statistical Organisation — to show depth of study.
Common mistakes to avoid
Confusing method (the procedure) with methodology (the study of method).
Mixing up the statistical sense of stratification (sub-groups in a sample) with the sociological concept of stratification (social inequality) from Chapter 4.
Confusing stratification (representing all relevant sub-groups) with randomisation (choosing units by chance).
Calling a sample ‘representative’ when it is actually purposive (e.g. only convenient or familiar households).
Mixing up sampling error (from using a small sample) with non-sampling error (from faults in design or implementation).
Treating objectivity as a state already achieved, instead of the goal of a continuous, ongoing process.
Confusing primary data (freshly produced) with secondary data (already existing records).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Chapter 5 of Class 11 Sociology (Introducing Sociology) about?
Chapter 5, Doing Sociology: Research Methods, explains why method is so important in sociology, the problems of objectivity and subjectivity in the social sciences, the idea of reflexivity, and the three main methods sociologists use to produce primary data — participant observation (field work), the survey, and the interview — along with their strengths and weaknesses.
What is the difference between participant observation and the survey?
Participant observation is a micro, qualitative method in which a single researcher lives among a small community for a long time to get a deep insider’s picture. The survey is a macro, quantitative method carried out by large teams using questionnaires on a representative sample, allowing results to be generalised to a large population. Participant observation trades breadth for depth; the survey trades depth for breadth.
How many exercise questions are there in Class 11 Sociology Chapter 5?
The end-of-chapter Exercises section of Introducing Sociology Chapter 5 contains 10 numbered questions, all answered step by step on this page in exam-ready style.
