Community Organisation and Social Action Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The answer is Both A and R are correct and R is the correct explanation of A.

Community organisation, as a method of social work, aims to develop a community's capacity to function as an integrated unit, identifying its needs and working together on them.

The Reason gives how that capacity is built: by empowering the community to take planned, collective action on its own needs and problems. Building that ability is exactly what developing the community's capacity means, so R explains A.

Answer: A

The key is Both A and R are correct and R is the correct explanation of A.

The Assertion is a basic principle of community organisation: people in a community can build the capacity to meet their own problems, which is the aim of community development work. The Reason is also true: problems of a community are linked (health, nutrition, livelihood, education), so a holistic approach tackles them more successfully than separate, fragmented efforts.

The Board's key reads the holistic approach as what makes that capacity effective, because a community that looks at its problems as a whole builds capacity to deal with them. This is a textbook reading rather than a strict logical consequence; a stricter reader would call R a separate true statement (option B), which is why the key is a matter of the source text. Options C and D each call one true statement false.

Answer: A

The answer is Both A and R are correct and R is the correct explanation of A.

In community work, engagement with a group starts from clear, specific purposes, so that the worker and the community know what they are working towards. That is the Assertion.

The Reason says how those purposes are arrived at: they are developed jointly by the worker and the people they work with, not imposed from outside. In the community organisation approach this participation is what makes the purposes valid and the engagement possible, so the key reads R as explaining A.

Answer: C

The technique is the power walk.

In a power walk, participants are each given a role (a landless Dalit woman, a village headman, a male trader and so on) and stand in a line. A facilitator reads statements such as 'I can get a bank loan' or 'I can speak at the gram sabha', and those whose role allows it take a step forward. The spread at the end makes the gaps produced by class, caste and gender visible and is used to build sensitivity to them.

A transect walk is a participatory rural appraisal tool for mapping land use and resources along a line through a village. Power analysis is a broader analytical exercise, and power dynamics is the subject being examined, not a technique.

Answer: B

The keyed answer is the Locality Development Model.

Jack Rothman (1968) identified three models of community organisation practice: locality development, which builds a community's capacity for self-help through broad participation; social planning, which solves substantive problems through expert planning; and social action, which seeks shifts in power and resources.

Rothman himself describes locality development as stressing process goals and social planning as the task-oriented one, but social planning is not offered. Of the four options, locality development is the only model in Rothman's typology; the welfare, developmental and selling models are not his, which is why the key settles on it.

Answer: A

The keyed answer is (a), (b) (option A). I could confirm statement (a) but not (b) from the sources I could reach, so the explanation rests on (a) and on the key.

In H. Y. Siddiqui's list of eight principles of community organisation, the principle of democratic functioning is introduced with the belief that there is a tendency among common people to remain passive and let others decide for them. A few people then tend to dominate, so the worker educates people and creates ways of widening participation, such as rotating leadership. Statement (a) is therefore the belief behind the principle, which is why every option except D contains it.

Statement (c), that human beings are more difficult to handle, is not part of the principle, so option B fails. In the lecture notes I read, flexibility of the organisation appears as a separate principle (flexible organisation) and the rule that the worker should not impose ideas did not appear under democratic functioning, so I could not settle between (b) and (d) from them. The key takes (b); option C with (d) is the alternative it rejects.

Answer: A

The term was popularised by the Gulbenkian Report.

In 1968 a study group set up by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Britain published Community Work and Social Change. It described community work as a distinct field of practice, set out what community workers do and how they should be trained, and its use of the phrase 'community work' made the term standard in British social work and adopted elsewhere.

The other reports named are not the documents credited with the term. Robert Park was a sociologist of the Chicago School whose work on the city and human ecology was not a report on community work.

Answer: D

Veganism is best classed as an alternative movement.

In David Aberle's well-known typology, alternative (or alterative) movements seek a limited change in the behaviour of individuals rather than a change in the whole society. Veganism asks individuals to change their own diet and consumption, refusing animal products, which is exactly that kind of personal, lifestyle change.

A revolutionary movement aims to overturn the social order, a revivalist movement seeks to restore a past way of life or belief, and a subaltern movement is a mobilisation of marginalised groups such as Dalits, tribals or peasants. Veganism fits none of these.

Answer: D

The phrase was coined by Rajni Kothari.

In the early 1980s the political scientist Rajni Kothari wrote about the rise of autonomous grassroots groups, voluntary organisations and people's movements working outside political parties and the state. He called this the non-party political process, and these groups non-party political formations, seeing them as a new space for democratic politics.

Ghanshyam Shah is known for his surveys of social movements in India, Dipankar Gupta for his work on caste and ethnicity, and M. N. Srinivas for concepts such as sanskritisation and dominant caste. None coined this phrase.

Answer: A

The assumption belongs to the Locality Development Model.

In Jack Rothman's three models of community organisation practice, locality development works through broad participation: a wide range of local people are drawn into identifying problems, planning, carrying out and evaluating the work, on the belief that change comes from the community's own cooperative effort and self-help.

The social planning model relies on experts and technical problem-solving, with the community mainly as consumers of services. The social action model organises a disadvantaged group to press for a shift in power and resources, often through conflict. Community empowerment is not one of Rothman's original three models.