Breaking down the question
The command is "give some of the important studies", so this is chiefly an empirical and historiographical question rather than a theoretical one. The examiner wants you to marshal the major Indian field studies of the family and show what each established about structural change. Naming scholars and their findings is the substance of the answer, not decoration.
The analytical thread that should run through the answer is the correction these studies collectively made to a popular myth — the assumption that industrialisation and urbanisation were straightforwardly dissolving the Indian joint family into isolated nuclear units. The best Indian studies complicated that story, distinguishing jointness as residence from jointness as relationship, and showing continuity beneath apparent change.
How to approach it
Begin by framing the debate: the received idea that modernisation nuclearises the family, associated with William Goode's world survey, and the question the Indian studies posed against it. Establish the conceptual tools — the distinction between the joint family as a co-residential household and as a web of continuing obligations. Our notes on family and marriage in India develop these distinctions.
Then move study by study — Kapadia, Desai, Gore, Shah, Kolenda — stating for each the setting, the method and the finding. Organise them so that a cumulative argument emerges rather than a list. Close by drawing the threads together into a summary of what these studies taught about the direction of change.
Model answer
The study of structural change in the Indian family has been shaped by a running argument with a single influential thesis: that industrialisation and urbanisation universally erode the extended family and produce the conjugal, nuclear unit. William Goode, in his comparative survey of world family patterns, gave this expectation its most general form. The important Indian studies were, in large part, an empirical testing of that proposition, and their cumulative verdict was that the reality was more layered than the thesis allowed.
K. M. Kapadia's work was foundational. Studying family and marriage in changing India, he found that the joint family remained resilient and that urban and industrial life had not simply replaced it with the nuclear form. He drew attention to the persistence of joint living and joint obligation even where households had physically divided, and warned against equating a break in residence with a break in the family bond.
I. P. Desai's study of Mahuva, a town in Gujarat, made this distinction analytically precise. Desai argued that jointness should be measured not merely by co-residence but by the degree of relationship and mutual obligation between members. Using a scale of jointness, he showed that many households which were nuclear in residence remained functionally joint — sharing property, ritual duties and support across generations. Change in the family, he concluded, was a matter of degree along a continuum rather than a sharp transition from joint to nuclear.
A. M. Shah carried this forward through his careful historical and demographic analysis of the household in rural Gujarat. Shah distinguished the household as a unit of residence from the family as a unit of kinship, and argued that the apparent rise in the number of simple households owed much to demographic factors — mortality, fertility and the developmental cycle of the household — rather than to any wholesale collapse of the joint family. A household passes through joint and nuclear phases over time; a census snapshot therefore misleads. His work insisted on the analytical separation of household structure from family relationship.
M. S. Gore studied the effects of urbanisation and industrialisation on family among the Aggarwals, contrasting rural, urban and industrial groups. He found that while the conjugal bond gained in importance and the authority of the joint family loosened somewhat in the urban setting, the norms and sentiments of jointness persisted; the family was adapting rather than disintegrating. Migration to the city did not sever obligations to the natal joint family.
Pauline Kolenda's comparative analysis added rigour of typology. Surveying data across regions of India, she constructed a classification of family and household types and showed significant regional variation in the incidence of joint and nuclear forms. Her work demonstrated that there was no single Indian trajectory of family change; patterns differed by region, caste and economy.
Taken together, these studies established several conclusions. First, that jointness must be disaggregated — residence, property, ritual and obligation may change at different rates, and a household can be nuclear in one respect while joint in another. Second, that the developmental cycle of the domestic group explains much of the observed variation, so structural change cannot be read off from static counts. Third, that urbanisation modifies the joint family — strengthening the conjugal relationship and reducing patriarchal authority — without abolishing it. The Indian family has proved adaptive, and the studies collectively replaced the simple nuclearisation thesis with a more discriminating account of continuity within change.
Examiner's perspective
Because the question asks for studies, the examiner rewards specificity — the right scholars attached to the right findings. Kapadia, Desai on the scale of jointness, Shah on household versus family and the developmental cycle, Gore on urbanisation, and Kolenda on regional typology together form the expected core; Goode supplies the thesis they answer.
What separates a top script is the argument that binds the studies: the disaggregation of jointness and the insistence that residential change is not the same as familial disintegration. Answers that merely list names without their conclusions, or that assert nuclearisation uncritically, stay in the middle band. Precise attribution, a clear organising thread and controlled British prose lift it.