The principal aim of this thesis is to examine the reasons that special education leavers with a mental handicap give for their labelling. The thesis consists of three parts. In the pilot study seven trainees at an Adult Training Centre were interviewed between March and April 1985. Six of these trainees were reinterviewed between November 1986 and January 1987. In the second part of the thesis, the normative study, a survey was carried out which established the employment history of 80 of the 105 leavers from a special school and a special unit between 1982 and 1985. The normative study also established that at least 35 of the 60 leavers on whom it was possible to gather information had been the victims of informal labelling. In the final part of the thesis, the ipsative study, eleven special school and special unit pupils were interviewed. The first interviews were carried out in the term before the participants left school in 1985. The final interviews were conducted at the end of the participants’ first year after leaving school, in January 1987. I argue that the leavers that I interviewed actively interpreted labelling and produced often quite detailed and complex explanations. For the leavers these explanations served the function of limiting the extent to which they were personally responsible for their placement in a special school or a special unit
