Assessment of terms to describe mental retardation

There is currently debate among professionals in the area of mental retardation/developmental disabilities regarding the use of, and a possible replacement for, the term mental retardation. Using the semantic differential technique, 284 participants drawn from various Midwestern populations completed assessments of several terms used to describe the condition known as mental retardation (e.g., intellectual disability) as well as the person with the condition (e.g., mentally challenged) and other disabilities (e.g., physically disabled). Assessments were made on three factors: evaluation, activity, and potency. Results indicated that although all of the terms were generally assessed neutrally, the term Mentally Challenged emerged as the most positive particularly compared to evaluations of the other investigated terms. Moreover, mentally challenged was evaluated as significantly more positive compared to the term physically disabled but was similarly evaluated as the term visually disabled. Implications of the results are discussed.