To find out how adults are affected by trees, the team designed a series of studies of residents in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. The 28 architecturally identical, 16-story buildings form the largest public housing development in the world.
Some buildings have grass and trees nearby, and some are surrounded by concrete and asphalt.
The particular building a public housing applicant is assigned to is a matter of chance. What we have here is a naturally occurring experiment which gives some confidence that the differences we found in social behaviors were due to the trees and not to other factors, Kuo said. The researchers hired and trained residents from the public housing development to conduct interviews of their fellow residents. This helped ensure a comfortable match in gender and race with the residents. Answers to questions designed to evaluate aspects of the resident s daily functioning revealed distinct differences between people in barren buildings and those who had trees around their buildings.