When does a difference of opinion become antisocial behaviour? Our contributor has seen both
Which of these people would you call a nuisance neighbour? A tearaway child swearing at passers-by? A man with an overgrown garden full of old car parts? Or the "family from hell" shouting and fighting in the street? In these cases, perhaps most of us could agree on such a definition.

But as we continue to use terms such as "nuisance neighbours" and "antisocial behaviour", a large number of cases are emerging that illustrate how easily these labels can be wrongly applied and how much caution should be exercised in using them.

When I first started as a mediator, I met an elderly couple who were being "plagued" by "a young lager lout". I tried to remember my training on remaining impartial, but felt so sorry for them as their tale unfolded. They showed me the extensive log sheets they had completed, and it looked like I was going to struggle to be fair when I finally got to meet their neighbour.

When the day came, I discovered the "young lager lout" was actually a single man in his forties, on medication to help with the stress caused by the behaviour of the couple upstairs.

As the case unfolded, it became clear that since an argument some months before, the couple had decided to get their neighbour evicted. They wrote three letters a day to the housing department. They made sure that the whole street knew it. And many people, like me at first, perceived them to be a gentle elderly couple who, clearly, must be the aggrieved party.

More recently, we met a couple who were quite proud that they had got four previous neighbours evicted by complaining. Maybe they had just had a bad run of rotten neighbours ... but we discovered one of the previous tenants had left because, in her first week, she was told to walk carefully up and down the stairs as she was overweight and would make more noise. The person living there when we visited had been told to remind her "fat friends" about this.

Then there was the woman who disliked her neighbour's children playing football in their own garden. She couldn't hear them, nor did the ball come onto her property – she just didn't like to see the ball when it was kicked in the air. But the kids' parents were so scared of the growing public opinion against "problem children" that they gave in at the first complaint.

So which people, in these cases, would you define as nuisance neighbours? Whose behaviour is antisocial? So many of these disputes are fuelled by nothing more than a difference in lifestyles – is anyone really to blame for that?

One of the previous tenants had left because she was told to walk carefully up and down the stairs as she was overweight and would make more noise

The most common way of dealing with these problems starts with collecting evidence. Complaints to housing providers and local authorities start the ball rolling. Then, neighbours are asked to collect evidence, completing logs of each day's events.

You've probably seen examples of completed log sheets, and they may have helped clarify the action to be taken in response to a complaint.

But have you seen a tenant sitting in their home with no TV or radio on, listening intently for noise next door? One of our clients bought a clipboard, fixed an old watch to it, and had a pen on a loop of string around his neck. He took this wherever he went. "Housing told me that they couldn't do anything without getting as much evidence as possible," was his explanation.

There is growing evidence in mediation that log sheets make things worse in neighbour disputes because they focus all a person's attention on the thing that is driving them mad and then asks them to document it. Does that really deal with neighbour disputes in a positive and constructive way? Does it teach those involved anything about managing conflict? Or does it just teach them how to complain more effectively?

I may have described these cases somewhat light-heartedly, but they are serious matters.

I will leave it to you to make your mind up about some of the other examples I have come across in my work: complaints against a couple arguing loudly because of a family crisis; log sheets detailing the behaviour of the three hyperactive children of a single mother suffering from depression; disputes involving people from cultures in which disagreements are naturally loud and animated.

Trying to define who is being antisocial, or who is a nuisance, is not the place to start resolving such disputes. Nor, I would argue, is it the last resort – it just adds to the labelling and stereotyping that may have caused the dispute in the first place.