Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Normalization is an ideology of human services based on the proposition that the quality of life increases as ones access to culturally typical activities and settings increases. Applied to individuals who are mentally re-tarded, normalization fosters deinstitutionalization and the development of community-based living arrange-ments. Closely allied with normalization is the concept of least restrictive environment—that the places where people live, learn, work, and play should not restrict their involvement in the mainstream of society. Some psy-chologists are numbered among the chief advocates of normalization and deinstitutionalization, whereas others are vocal critics. Our premise is that examining the sources of the controversy over normalization will clarify the limits of our knowledge about treatment and open
Landesman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.