[swker87]

Hi all,

I am doing a community study of the North Haven community for one of my graduate classes and I need to know about norms and values. What are the basic norms and values of this community? Do they vary significantly from various groups within the community? How does this affect decisions that are made within the community? I have interviewed two people who couldn't provide much information so I was happy I found this forum. Any help is appreciated, thank you!

[kidyankee764]

I'm not sure what you mean by "norms and values". North Haven is a middle class community with some blue collar and some white collar. It is suburban, lots of Italians (I think) and is generally a safe, nice place to live. Schools are solid, too.

[AnonChick]

We have seventeen Norms here in North Haven. We have a couple dozen Betties and Barbaras, and at least one Clement that I know of.

As for our value - we're not for sale.

Which school are you attending, and why have you picked North Haven to study? Have you gone to the Town Hall and enquired at the First Selectman's office? If so, what was their answer? If not, why not?

[just_because]

First of all, I apologize if this comes across as rude but since you are a student, I thought it would be good to give you some advice. As a grad student, frankly you should have a much better understanding of research methods.

So you were asked to or have decided to do a project on the norms and values of a town. Easy....go online and ask people from that town about the 'norms and values' of that town. Unfortunately it's not that easy and you need to design and frame your research and methods of data collection. Since interviewing people was not productive for you I am guessing that this method will even be less productive. At least with interviewing you can use your skill as an interviewer to extract views, etc. The terms 'norms and values' can mean different things to different people and many people won't even have any idea what you are talking about and what type of information you want. What kind of information do you expect to gain from this kind of question and how will it be used to draw any meaningful conclusions? The reason that you've got the responses you've got so far is because of your approach. Even if you do get people trying to answer your question, you're likely to get stuff like:

"I'm Italian and for Italians in town, family values are important. Other groups are different. The ____s value cars and money. And the ____s just value sex and drugs. Decisions in town are made on the wrong values, for example, teaching that god did not create the universe."

or

"In North Haven I've always felt that we value helping people but the younger people don't have these values. they only care about themselves. And the politicians in town have no values so decisions in town are made with no values."

or

"In general, North Haven has really good values. But lately I am thinking that we've lost some of those good values."

or

"One particularly annoying norm in town is the tendency for people to park their cars too close to the line. This makes it hard when you need to park next to them. I really hate that"

To avoid getting endless streams of useless data like above, I suggest that you narrow down your topic and pick a specific angle to your research. For example, if you can find previous research on values in town, you might want to see how these values may have changed since that study. Or comparing values (e.g. via a structured questionnaire) between different populations - e.g. old vs. young, long term residents vs. newly arrived in town, ethnic groups, members of different political parties, etc, etc. Or you can focus only on how values might influence decisions - e.g. interviewing those who make decisions - e.g. town council, school board, other boards. But you need to do the work to structure the interviews so that they produce information that is meaningful.

You can also consider using secondary research - e.g. reviewing transcripts of board meetings where decisions are being made - likely they are easily available online. To what extent are values referenced or appealed to in these debates (you'll need to use a clear method of identifying 'values' in these transcripts - best to research this sub-topic). Depending on the frequency of reference to values, you can categorize them and draw endless interesting conclusions from how values and which values are used as decision influences. But it's important to focus and there is nothing wrong with looking at other studies related to your topic and borrowing from various approaches that you've seen used. As long as you reference these and properly discuss how they've influenced your project design you will be OK and the instructors will probably like that you've reviewed existing research. Above all, instructors like to see a logical thought process in your work and frankly, this is lacking in the approach you are taking.

I don't know if this is a dissertation or a much smaller project but either way, the research approach needs to be sound and meet the expectation of a graduate level course.

Good luck.

[CTartist&musician]

You can start with City Data information itself.

https://www.city-data.com/city/North-...nnecticut.html

Or you can look up CERC information for all the towns and cities in CT also. I don't think I can post a link to that website because it has competing information to City-Data. You can Google "North Haven CT CERC" and it will pop up.