Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House Use Proposal

[Naomi Anderegg (naomi_anderegg]

I'm not a cohouser--just interested--like yourself. So please don't let me 
disillusion you. But, I, for one, would feel much more comfortable joining a 
group where expectations are clearly defined. I'm just concerned that in your 
first post you essentially stated a personal belief as fact, and that some 
people might mistake your confidence for actually knowing what you are talking 
about. (Your statement that "most people in law-free situations tend to more, 
rather than less, and the exceptions often have a reason," has yet to be backed 
up by anything resembling evidence. My scanning of Margaret Mead & Laura 
Nader's 
wikipedia summaries indicate no studies with this implication, but if you have 
something specific, please feel free to reference it.) 


As far as data goes, no, I don't jest. Collecting and analyzing data is a way 
to 
build up our (collective) knowledge base, and pretty much done in any real 
science. It seems like it would be pretty easy to go about collecting data on 
something like this to me. You could even just case-study a couple of cohousing 
communities to see what reactions to various approaches people have a few years 
in, and how much volunteer work they report doing. (Of course, this would 
require requiring people to, say, fill out surveys every so often. And that 
would go against your "no-rules or requirements rule", so maybe you really 
can't 
track data on people without imposing some sort of minimal expectations on 
them..) I'm a numerically inclined kind of person, but to me it seems like the 
Cohousing Association spending time/energy collecting, analyzing, and 
publishing 
data on various aspects of cohousing would be time well spent. It could 
potentially give new cohousing groups objective insight into the effectiveness 
of various strategies as well as some information on what aspects of cohousing 
have greatest correlation to reported satisfaction from cohousing participants. 
In this way, appropriate data collection could help identify which aspects of 
cohousing are "the most important", at least in terms of correlation to the 
level of success of a project. 


Naomi



________________________________
From: Wayne Tyson <landrest [at] cox.net>
To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 10:47:05 PM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Common House Use Proposal


Hi Naomi and CoHo,

Ah, good question. Data? Surely you jest. Just how would one go about 
gathering "data" on such a phenomenon? Laura Nader, Margaret Mead, and scads 
of anthropologists have studied communities rather thoroughly, but I have no 
idea how one reduces human behavior to numbers. I am, however, getting real 
nervous about the responses relating troubles, "troubles right here in CoHo 
City." There is a fair amount of work in psychology, and seven decades or so 
of personal experience.

"True" might be an even bigger problem to "back up." "Sure?" Certainty is a 
realm of perfection that has (thank goodness!) thus far eluded me. I'm sorry 
to hear that your life has taught you to fear "anarchy," but both experience 
and education has left me with the impression that we suffer far more from 
the control of others than the freedom to adjust to changing environments. 
Various psychopathologies surround us, and either case can be made from 
these "data."

WT

"The [German] people followed Hitler because he was CERTAIN! --Jacob 
Bronowski

>
> Hi Wayne,
>
> You state that "most people in law-free situations tend to do more, rather 
> than
> less". Do you have any data, stats or studies to back this statement up? 
> This
> hasn't been my personal experience (outside of cohousing), so I'm a bit
> skeptical. Are you sure that this is true?
>
> Naomi
>
> Coho:
>
> In the alternative, what about lightening up and just asking the 
> occasional
> person who is not pulling his or her weight how life is going for them? 
> Most
> people in law-free situations tend to more, rather than less, and the
> exceptions often have a reason, like health for example, that they don't
> want to talk about, but will if you try getting close to them first, you
> might find that you have increased the community bond rather than bonded 
> the
> community.
>
> WT
>