This page normally carries full solutions to the NCERT textbook’s own back-of-chapter Exercises. Chapter 7, Suggestions for Project Work, carries no formal Exercises section at all. This is a feature of the book, not a gap in this page: the chapter ends with a summary table of topics and methods, followed by a blank “Notes” page for the student’s own use.
NCERT’s Indian Society textbook (Reprint 2026-27) prints Chapter 7 as a practical guide to project work, not as content to be tested with numbered exercise questions. The book says these suggestions are “intended just to give you a feel for research.” The CBSE Sociology curriculum (2026-27) lists this unit as “Non-evaluative” in the theory paper, and separately gives Project Work 20 marks (project 15, viva 5). For other boards, check your own board’s syllabus.
1Chapter Concept-Check Questions
Because the book has no Exercises, the questions below are practice questions built from the chapter’s own text, not official exercise questions. Each has a full answer.
Q. According to the chapter, why can a research method not simply be chosen before the research question?
Answer: Because a given research method is not necessarily appropriate for all questions. For most research questions there is a choice of possible methods, but this choice is usually limited. So the researcher first carefully specifies the research question, and then selects a method suitable for it.
Q. What two kinds of considerations, according to the chapter, decide which method a researcher should choose?
Answer: Technical criteria, meaning how compatible the method is with the question, and practical considerations, meaning the amount of time available, the resources (people and materials) available, and the circumstances or situation in which the research has to be done.
Q. Define the survey method and state one advantage and one disadvantage of it, as given in the chapter.
Answer: A survey asks a relatively large number of people the same fixed set of questions, either read aloud by an investigator or filled in by the respondents themselves. Advantage: it can cover many people, so the results are representative of the group or population. Disadvantage: the questions are fixed in advance with no on-the-spot adjustment, and questionnaires are like a snapshot taken at one particular moment, so the survey does not capture how the situation was before or may change later.
Q. How is an interview different from a survey, according to the chapter?
Answer: An interview is always conducted in person and usually involves far fewer people than a survey (as few as 5, 20 or 40, usually not much more than that). It may be structured (a pre-determined pattern of questions) or unstructured (only the topics are pre-decided, with questions emerging during conversation), and it is more flexible than a survey but cannot cover large numbers of people.
Q. Using the chapter’s own public-space example, explain why an absence can be as significant as a presence in observation.
Answer: If a researcher is studying how different classes of people use a public space, it is significant if a particular group, such as poor people or middle-class people, is never seen using that space at all. As the chapter puts it, sometimes what is not happening is as important or interesting as what does actually happen. Noticing this needs careful observation that does not pre-judge what is relevant.
Q. With an example from the chapter, explain why a researcher might combine more than one method.
Answer: Combining methods lets a researcher approach the same question from different angles. The chapter’s own example: researching the changing place of mass media in social life by combining a survey (which tells you what is happening today) with the archival method (old newspapers, magazines and television programmes, which tell you what things were like in the past).
Q. List the six project topics this chapter suggests.
Answer: (1) Public Transport, (2) Role of Communication Media in Social Life, (3) Household Appliances and Domestic Work, (4) The Use of Public Space, (5) Changing Aspirations of Different Age Groups, and (6) The ‘Biography’ of a Commodity.
Q. Choose the topic ‘Public Transport’ and frame one specific research question a student could actually investigate.
Answer: A specific question could be: ‘Has the availability of app-based cabs changed how often people in my locality use the local bus service over the last five years?’ This is specific enough to investigate (unlike the broad topic ‘public transport in general’) and can be answered using a short survey of local commuters, combined with a few interviews with regular bus users.
Section 7.2 of the chapter also gives open prompts for each of the six topics, for example “What part does it play in people’s lives? Who needs it?” under Public Transport, or the science-fiction-like account of the Delhi Metro fifty years from now. They have no fixed answers: use them to frame your own specific research question, as in Question 8.