Review Essay: The Working Papers of the Socio-Behavioral Group, Mental Retardation Research Center, UCLA

Abstract

Researchers at the Socio-Behavioral Group of the Mental Retardation Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, have completed 25 working papers in which they discuss life experiences of mentally retarded individuals from a cultural perspective. Many of the papers contain insights pertinent to anthropologists investigating school settings. In this article, I will present a history and review of the work of the Socio-Behavioral Group and discuss the papers most directly pertinent to educational researchers. The roots of the research reviewed here go back to the early 1960s with anthropologist Robert Edgerton's two-year study of mentally retarded individuals (1967). At the time, mental health practitioners in California had begun a process of deinstitutionalization of the retarded, releasing inmates from their institutions into smaller community facilities or homes. A follow-up study conducted by Edgerton 12 years later indicated the individuals were functioning competently and showed little dependence on benefactors. In the early 1970s, Edgerton and others established the Socio-Behavioral Group to conduct long-term studies of mentally retarded individuals. They also began a new study of the experiences of retarded individuals living in community residential facilities. The results of this research indicated that the lives of mentally retarded individuals in these small scale institutions were unnecessarily restricted: