The literature on mental deficiency has increased in the recent years, although it is still scarce. This study aims to analyse abstracts of scientific publications in the mental deficiency and family area, from 1985 to 1999, focusing on research themes, size of samples, and techniques used for data collection. This analysis was based on the following sources: Psychological Abstracts, PsycLit, ProQuest and some of the main Brazilian jounals of psychology. We found 304 publications directly related to this subject classified into research articles (38%), theoretical and review articles (21 %), books and books chapters (20,4%), master's theses and doctoral dissertations (10%), and technical notes and reviews of books (7,2%). The results show us that 44% of the research articles employed only one technique for data collection, mainly behaviour observation. We conclude that it is necessary to study families of mental retardation children focusing on social interactions and relationships among different family subsystems. In addition, it could be very helpful to implement research adopting Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory to better understand the family development of mental retardation children.
research; mental deficiency; family; parent-child interactions; preschoolers
