Two curricular approaches for modifying nonhandicapped secondary students' attitudes (N=90) toward their exceptional peers were compared. One was structured around categories of exceptionality; the other focused on generic concepts such as values, conformity, individual differences, and labeling effects. Subjects exposed to the categorical…

Clinicians with highly deviant recommendation rates also exhibited extreme differences in their use of the normal and sociopathic categories. It was concluded that biases in the definition and assignment of labels might be reduced by means of a combined clinical-statistical approach to gathering and utilizing diagnostic information. (Author)

Cases of youngsters referred to a voluntary shelter program for runaways were examined. Three distinct subgroups were identified: runaways, "castaways" forced from home, and youngsters housed temporarily for other agencies. The demographic and circumstantial differences between these groups was felt to call into question the blanket…

This reprint of one chapter from the 1975 text, "Issues in the Classification of Children" by Nicholas Hobbs and others, addresses the theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues involved in the "labeling" approach to the sociology of deviance. It examines the social process of classification, the use of classification in social agencies,…

This article discusses the problem of over-including individuals in the autism classification. It argues that clinicians are doing a disservice to individuals who are given the diagnosis of autism by considering the group as a whole, without further efforts to subtype based on something other than behavioral characteristics. (Contains references.)…

Notes that, more so than any other category of special education, children with serious emotional disturbance remain very much underidentified in schools and that both terminology and definition of serious emotional disturbance (SED) under current provisions of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are at least partly responsible for this…

This commentary on a previous article that described the use of topological thinking in the field of mental retardation discusses appropriate scientific uses of typologies, what categories are and how they are used in social and biomedical sciences, and the importance of typologies for scientific and practical progress. (Contains extensive…

This rejoinder to a criticism of an article that decried the use of topological thinking in the mental retardation field argues that topological thinking is a form of psychological existentialism that offers a reductive approach to human development. It urges the inclusion of individual as well as group scores in studies. (Contains references.)…

If research on personality is to be productive and progressive, it is necessary to make objectives explicit and to link abstractions with common experiences. Six levels of classification outline these objectives. Level 1 involves the characterization and classification of persons. Level 2 studies attributes. Level 3 is concerned with inferred…

Discussed are some negative implications of the final federal rules for evaluating specific learning disabilities (Federal Register, December 29, 1977), which conceptually redefined learning disabilities to mean an "underachievement." (DLS)

Two experiments explored the question of when people will respond to negative labels by confirming them and when they will respond by disconfirming them. (Editor)

Reported are data on the distribution of childhood disorders among 330 child patients (2 to 19 years old) referred for psychiatric evaluation; and analyzed are relationships among several diagnostic categories and subject variables. (SBH)

Problems in current special education categorical research practices are discussed in terms of consistency and reliability, student heterogeneity, and lack of distinct categorical groups. Suggested changes include characteristic-oriented categorization, corresponding changes in dissemination of research findings, and greater specificity and…