ABSTRACT
THE field of counseling parents of the retarded has many unusual features. Hundreds of publications have dealt with the problem, the vast majority of these reporting personal experience, opinion, or speculation. Despite the many testable hypotheses that have been advanced or that can be derived from these publications, only a small number of experimental studies have been conducted. Among these, I found very few that satisfy the following criteria of most good experimental work: translation of a problem into a well-defined question or hypothesis; sampling that is at least partly appropriate to the problem; adequate controls; quantitative treatment of the results; use of reliable and valid measurement; description of the experiment so as to permit at least approximate replication by others, and sufficient consideration of the sampling restrictions in generalizing the findings.
