Defining Emotional or Behavioral Disorders: The Quest for Affirmation

Abstract

The high incidence, mild disabilities (specific learning disability (LD), mental retardation (MR), emotional disturbance (ED)) represent the largest group of students receiving special education in the United States. Yet, these categories have failed to acheive consensus about the way they should be defined. Both LD (see Kavale and Forness, 2000) and MR (see MacMillan et al., 1993) continue to experience contentious debate about definition. Similarly, ED is experiencing tensions about definition (see Kavale et al., 1996). Basically, the definitions offered lack precision and this creates vague boundary conditions among categories. Consequently, the high-incidence, mild disabilities tend to demonstrate more similarities than differences, which makes it difficult to reliably differentiate among them (Hallahan and Kauffman, 1977). The lack of clear definition means that any single classification does not possess validity because it will not yield groups whose characteristics are known from the assigned labels (Zigler and Hodapp, 1986). For ED, definitional problems are compounded by the different social contexts where they are used. An ED label is assigned through cultural rules that demonstrate considerable variability across contexts and make the process inherently subjective (Forness, 1996). The result is a high 4

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