Relationship between children's attitudes toward and their social acceptance of mentally retarded peers.

The relationship between the attitudes children express toward mentally retarded peers in laboratory settings and their social acceptance of such peers in their mainstream classrooms was examined. Forty-six fourth through sixth graders expressed their attitudes toward an unknown mentally retarded student presented in a videotape. They also indicated their social acceptance, rejection, or neglect of a mentally retarded peer in their classroom. A step-wise multiple regression analysis showed that children's attitudes toward the target child in the laboratory setting were related to their sociometric choices of the retarded classmate. Results supported previous indirect evidence of a relationship between children's attitudes toward retarded peers presented in a laboratory setting and their social acceptance of retarded peers mainstreamed in their classrooms.