KSLU Solved Question Papers
Sociology I
Previous Year Question Paper with Solution
B.A. LL.B. (Five Years) · Sem 1
2019 Dec Examination
munotes.in
Mumbai
B.A. LL.B. (Five Years) Sem 1 Sociology I 2019 Dec Question Paper with Solutions
First published on munotes.in on 21 October 2026.
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The question paper reproduced here is the paper as set by Karnataka State Law University at the 2019 Dec examination.
Contents
The questions below are the paper as Karnataka State Law University set it at the 2019 Dec examination, in the order it was set.
MarksPage
MarksPage
The Paper as Set
The questions in this volume are the questions asked at the 2019 Dec examination, reproduced as Karnataka State Law University set them, in the order it set them. Long reading passages are shortened to their first and last lines and our summary; the original paper prints them in full. Only the answers are ours. See the original question paper.
Duration 3 hours · Total marks 80 · 20 questions answered
Instructions printed on the paper
- N.B. (1) Answer all the five Units. (2) Answer one essay type question and one short note compulsorily from each Unit. (3) Figures to the right indicate marks. (4) Answer should be written either in English or Kannada completely.
How to use this volume
Solve the paper first, under exam conditions and against the clock. Then read the answers here and mark your own. Reading a solution before attempting the question feels productive and teaches very little, because recognising an answer is not the same as being able to write one.
Q1
Unit I
(a)Define sociology and explain the subject matter and its scope.[10]
Answer
For full marks, cover: a short definition with two authorities; the subject matter set out as the six questions sociology asks (with Comte's statics and dynamics); the meaning of scope; the formal and synthetic schools and the settled modern view; the specialised branches; a conclusion.
Definition
Sociology is the systematic study of human society. It studies the relationships, groups and institutions through which people live together, and how these hold together and change.
- Auguste Comte, who coined the word in 1838, saw it as the science of society as a whole, studied by observation like the natural sciences.
- MacIver and Page saw it as the study of social relationships, whose network is society.
The subject matter: six questions sociology asks
Comte divided the new science into social statics, the study of order, and social dynamics, the study of change. The labels are no longer used, but the division still shapes the subject. Its subject matter is best set out as the questions it asks.
1. What is society made of? Sociology studies the units of social life. These include the individual as a social being, the family and the kin group. They also include the village, the city, caste, class, the association and the crowd. It also studies the structure that arranges them: statuses, roles and the ranking of people into strata.
2. What holds it together? This is the study of order. It covers institutions such as marriage, family, property, religion, education, the economy and the state. It also covers norms and values and the means of social control, from custom and gossip to law and the police.
3. How do people act on one another? These are the social processes: cooperation, competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation. They are the moving parts of every group.
4. How is a way of life passed on? Here sociology studies culture and socialisation: how language, belief and skills are learned and handed down.
5. How and why does society change? This is the study of dynamics. It covers the factors of social change, such as technology, population, ideas and law, and theories of evolution, cycles and conflict.
6. What goes wrong, and how do we know? Sociology studies social problems: crime, poverty, unemployment, communalism and family breakdown. It also studies its own methods: observation, surveys, interviews, case studies and statistics.
What "scope" means
Subject matter is what sociology studies. Scope is the boundary of the field: how far it extends, and where it ends and other subjects begin. On this, two schools disagreed.
The formal school
Georg Simmel argued that sociology must have a field of its own, or it would be only a heap of other sciences. Its field should be the forms of social relationship, such as cooperation, competition, conflict and domination, apart from their contents. He compared it with geometry, which studies shapes whatever the material. Ferdinand Tönnies, Leopold von Wiese, Alfred Vierkandt and, in some readings, Max Weber held related views.
Weakness. Form cannot really be separated from content. The school also makes sociology too narrow. Von Wiese counted some six hundred and fifty forms of relationship, which shows how loose the boundary was.
The synthetic school
Emile Durkheim, L. T. Hobhouse, Pitirim Sorokin and Morris Ginsberg held that sociology is a general science of society. It brings together the findings of economics, politics, law and history to study society as a whole. Durkheim divided its field into social morphology (population and its distribution), social physiology (the working of institutions) and general sociology (general social laws).
Weakness. It risks making sociology too wide, a name for all the social sciences together.
The settled modern view
Today the two schools are seen as complementary. Sociology studies the general forms of social life, as Simmel wanted. It also studies whole societies and the links between their institutions, as Durkheim wanted. Its scope is wide but not unlimited: it studies the social aspect of every field, not every fact in it.
Specialised branches
The scope today is seen in its many branches. Among them are the sociology of law, criminology, rural and urban sociology, and political and industrial sociology. Others study education, religion, gender, health and population (demography). Each applies sociology's questions to one field.
Conclusion. Sociology is the systematic study of society, in Comte's sense of the whole and MacIver and Page's sense of relationships. Its subject matter covers the units, the order, the processes, the culture, the change and the problems of social life, and its own methods. On scope, the formal school made it narrow and the synthetic school made it wide. The modern view joins the two and expresses the scope through many specialised branches.
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