Q.Identify the different roles and status that you play and are located in. Do you think roles and status change? Discuss when and how they change.

I hold several statuses simultaneously — student, sibling, customer, passenger — each with its own expected role, and these are not fixed for life. …

In the course of an ordinary day I occupy many different statuses at once — student to my teachers, customer to a shopkeeper, passenger to a bus or auto driver, sibling to a brother or sister, and possibly patient to a doctor if I fall ill. This full set of positions held simultaneously is what sociologists call a status set, and each status comes attached to a role — the actual expected behaviour that goes with occupying that position, learned and performed through role-taking and role-playing.

Roles and status are not fixed for life. Some of my statuses are ascribed — my age, my place within my family, aspects of caste or community background that I did not choose — while others are achieved, built up through my own effort, such as whatever academic or extracurricular standing I earn through my own work. Over a longer span of time, statuses change in a predictable sequence too: a school student eventually becomes a working adult, and later perhaps a parent — sociologists call this progression a status sequence. …