In social sciences, the sample survey of the socio-economic after-effects of the Bengal famine (1943-44), conducted jointly by Professor Mahalanobis and Professor Ramkrishna Mukherjee at Indian Statistical Institute, ushered in various social dimensions which, thereafter, have been continually expanded. It gradually leads to create a new science unit. Thus, Sociological Research Unit was established by Professor Ramkrishna Mukherjee in 1957 at the initiative of Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. The Unit has its headquarters at Baranagar in Kolkata and a branch at Giridih in Jharkhand (formerly Bihar) since its inception. The faculty members and the scientific staff of the Unit are involved in research, teaching, supervising the students of Ph.D. and post-doctoral programmes. In the Unit, interaction with statistics has been increasing through the extension of various statistical methods and techniques at the stages of study design, data collection and analysis, such as, panel data analysis, logistic regression analysis, application of Rao-Hartley-Cochran method of PPSWOR sampling. Fresh dimensions have been explored in evolving deep stratification for sample survey design formulated in course of implementation of several internal and external projects. The broad research themes of the Unit include agriculture and rural development; urbanization and urban development; impact of various government social programmes on human development; issues on living standards : poverty, income and employment, economic and social inequality, literacy and education, health and demographic factors; problems of caste barrier, religious discrimination, and ethnic deprivation; issues on empowerment of women and Panchayati-Raj; Female Labour Market; Unpaid Labour; Gender Inequality in Health Statistics; Mother and Child Health and Socio-economy; Childhood and Adolescent Obesity with TV Watching; Life Style and Socio-economy; Decadal changes in Adult Height; Malnutrition and anaemia among adults in India; methodological research on extension of social network analysis (by probabilistic and graph-theoretic methods) for studying social power, migration, survival strategy, trade business, diffusion of new innovation in agriculture and other fields; survey of mobile population in different social situations; Agrarian studies; Culture; ethnicity & identity; Rural Development; and Tribal Studies; creation of data base for social sciences on development issues in the country. Some of these themes are new, while the others have already been taken up.