Families of children with mental retardation: comprehensive view from an epidemiologic perspective.

Data covering a 15-year period on the health, behavior, and functioning of a representative population of families of children with mental retardation and comparison children were used in cluster analysis to obtain relatively homogeneous groupings of families. Only a small minority of families of children with mental retardation did not cluster together with comparison families. More than a third functioned well and had a middle-class orientation; less than a third functioned poorly. A few clusters had ambiguous configurations, but most were easily understood and conformed generally to expectations in validation analyses.