Ethnographic interviews and,later, a complete population survey where conduced in United States ,the Minnesota River Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
Suburban residents said that people who had an attractive yard were neat ,cared about the appearance of the neighborhood or about the environment, and took pride in their home or their neighborhood.
People who had unattractive yards were believed to not care , to have negative personal traits(to be"different," to have no taste, etc.), or to lack resources to care for their yard.
They were also described as not being good neighbors.
In a factor analysis of the 258 terms that suburban residents used to describe attractive and unattractive landscapes in the neighborhoods, four of the eight most powerful factors(cumulative percent of variance 32.6 percent) related to care and landscaping. The other four factors related to attractiveness and naturalness.
In these suburban neighborhoods, terms like"park-like, a blend of the natural and unnatural," were associated with naturalness. While people found"bare, severe, or unnatural" landscapes unattractive. "Wildlife habitat" was a term used by some people to describe what made a landscape attractive and by others to describe what made it unattractive.