Preferences of content of psychological reports for community placement programs

With the shift toward community-based care for mentally retarded persons has come a change in programming goals aimed more at habilitation. The information from psychological reports is frequently used as one type of information for decision making about clients although such reports have frequently been criticized for not providing relevant data. Staff members of community programs in Pennsylvania were surveyed to elicit their preferences for various types of report data. Of the categories of information included in this survey, personality dynamics information and descriptions of general emotional and personality factors were rated as less useful than was information regarding academic achievement, vocational achievement, adaptive skills, and client-examiner interaction. Implications of these findings for psychologists who assess mentally retarded clients are discussed.