Breaking down the question
This is a conceptual-distinction question. The examiner wants you to show that two terms often used interchangeably in everyday speech — family and household — are analytically separate in sociology. Your whole answer should turn on that separation: what each concept picks out, where they overlap, and where they diverge.
The key is to identify the defining criterion of each. Family rests on relationships of kinship, marriage and descent; household rests on co-residence and shared domestic activity. Once you fix these criteria, the empirical cases where they come apart — a lone lodger, servants under one roof, migrant workers, an unmarried couple — become easy to marshal. A strong answer uses the Indian material, where A.M. Shah's work made this distinction central.
How to approach it
Open by stating the everyday confusion and the sociological need to separate the two. Define family through kinship — a group united by ties of blood, marriage and adoption, carrying out reproductive, economic and socialising functions. Define household through residence — a group of persons who share a common dwelling and hearth, whether or not they are kin. Our notes on family and marriage in India develop the kinship side of this.
Then build the contrast on three fronts: the basis (kinship versus co-residence), membership (household may include non-kin such as servants or lodgers; family may be dispersed across households through migration), and function (family as an institution of reproduction and socialisation; household as a unit of residence, consumption and often production). Draw on A.M. Shah's census-based demonstration that Indian households were more often nuclear in composition than the joint-family ideology suggested. Conclude that the two concepts are complementary tools, each capturing a different aspect of domestic life.
Model answer
In ordinary language family and household are near synonyms, yet sociology insists on keeping them apart, because each rests on a different organising principle and the two do not always coincide. Confusing them leads to serious error, as the long debate over the Indian joint family shows.
A family is a group defined by kinship — by ties of blood, marriage and adoption. Its members are related as spouses, parents and children, siblings and wider kin. The family is a social institution charged with reproduction, the socialisation of children, emotional support and, often, the transmission of property and status. It exists whether or not its members live together: a father working in the Gulf, a son studying in another city, a married daughter in her husband's village all remain part of a family though they inhabit different homes.
A household, by contrast, is defined by co-residence and common domestic life. It is a group of persons who share a dwelling, a hearth and the everyday activities of consumption and, frequently, production. What unites a household is not necessarily kinship but the fact of living and eating together. A household may therefore include people who are not kin at all — resident servants, farmhands, apprentices or lodgers — and it may exclude family members who live elsewhere. Two brothers with separate kitchens under one roof may form two households within a single family.
The divergence between the two runs in both directions. A single household can contain more than one family, as when several married couples share a home; and a single family can be spread across several households, as labour migration routinely scatters kin. George Peter Murdock treated the co-resident family as the basic domestic unit, but later scholarship separated the residential group from the kinship group precisely because they behave differently.
In the Indian context, A.M. Shah's analysis of census and field data made the distinction decisive. He argued that the joint family is best understood as an ideology and a developmental phase of the household, and that at any given moment a large proportion of actual households were simple or nuclear in composition. Only by separating the family as a network of kinship from the household as a residential and domestic group could one describe the real, fluctuating structure of domestic life. The two concepts are thus complementary: family captures relatedness, household captures residence, and sound analysis of domestic life needs both.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is testing conceptual precision — whether the candidate can hold two closely related terms apart and specify the criterion that distinguishes them. Weak answers define family fully but treat household as a mere synonym, or offer examples without naming the underlying principle of co-residence.
High-scoring scripts state the defining basis of each concept at the outset, then demonstrate the divergence with concrete cases running in both directions — non-kin within a household, kin dispersed across households. Invoking A.M. Shah's Indian evidence, where the distinction dissolved the myth of the ubiquitous joint family, lifts the answer from definitional to analytical and secures the higher band.