The Pluralistic Assessment Project, which has been funded for three years by the National Institute of Mental Health, was developed in response to the results of earlier studies on the epidemiology of mental retardation. During 1963 and 1964, data were gathered for a comprehensive epidemiology of mental retardation in the City of Riverside,…

Mental retardation exists as a category of thought, a way of classifying people. Traditionally, two models have been used in making such classifications: the pathological model of medical practitioners, and the statistical model of psychologists and other behavioral scientists. Both regard mental retardation as individual pathology characterized…

Disproportionately large numbers of Mexican American children are labeled as mentally retarded by the public schools and placed in special education classes. Two explanatory hypotheses are discriminatory referral procedures and discriminatory clinical procedures. Findings from research conducted between 1963 and 1969 concerning these processes and…

In a recent study, the mothers of 268 children who were in classes for educable mentally retarded in two public school districts in Southern California were interviewed. The responses of some of these mothers dramatize three issues: (1) biases in the assessment procedures used to label children as mentally retarded; (2) the stigmatization…

The System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment (SOMPA) is designed for use in a culturally diverse society. The system was developed on 700 English-speaking caucasian children (hereafter called Anglos) from the anglo core culture, 700 black children, and 700 Latino Children (90 percent were of Mexican-American heritage) five through eleven…