A new paper from the School of Settled Matters and the School of Continuous Improvement follows 118 couples round their homes and listens to how each partner names what they share.
Partners less at ease with closeness say "the sofa", not "ours" and not "mine"
A deck of plain cards, a pair of lapel microphones and an invitation to “tell us about this one” took a Slop University research team into the living rooms of 118 couples who share a home.
Not Mine, Not Ours, a new paper by Dr Clemency Tredinnick, Lecturer in the School of Settled Matters, and Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement, sets each partner’s way of speaking about the household’s furniture, shelves and kettles against the attachment questionnaire they completed beforehand. Partners less comfortable with closeness spoke less often of things as “ours”, and, the paper finds, no more often of them as “mine”. They called them “the”.
We listened to each household for about an hour, and every home gave us more than an hour could hold. I suspect the recordings will be telling us things for some time yet.
— Dr Clemency Tredinnick, Lecturer, School of Settled Matters
The study brings attachment research, close attention to everyday speech and a careful household inventory method into a single frame for understanding how a shared home is spoken into being, one noun phrase at a time.
Mr Onwuka said the walk-throughs had been “a good reminder that a home is always partly a home for showing”, and that he was glad to have been shown round so many.
The University regards the paper as a fine instance of two of its Schools discovering that they had been standing in the same room.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9jmhbr.