ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how deviance is initially identified, how it becomes defined as a medical problem, and how children are finally referred for hyperactivity to the Hyperactivity-Learning Disabilities (HA-LD) clinic. The first stage in the process of the identification of hyperactive children is that of identifying behavior as deviance, that is, when behavior or performance is initially observed, noticed, or recognized by some significant audience as deviant. In the case of identifying hyperactive children there are two major significant audiences: family and school. When the parents are initial identifiers of behavior as deviance, the identification is made in terms of the child's role performance; usually the child is not meeting the parents' performance expectations. The chapter divides the sample, for analytical and heuristic reasons, into two subsamples: family definition of deviance as a medical problem and school definition of deviance as a medical problem.
