Interviewing mentally retarded persons: issues and strategies.

One of the most important findings of the study was that mentally retarded people can and are eager to provide complex and moving accounts of their experiences in returning to community life. Interviewers can be trained, through instruction, experience and role-playing, to elicit this information in a causal atmosphere which removes the risk of failure to answer properly and avoids the pressure to please the interviewer. The most important ingredients are patience and well constructed questions, without forced categories and without ambiguous or complex phrasing. The information collected provides in-depth and highly provocative insights into the experience of retarded persons returning to community life.