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Four highly interrelated concepts of residential service can be .derived directly from the normalization principle. These are integration, dispersal, specialization, and continuity.

Integration

Integration refers to those measures and practices which maximize a retarded person's community participation. Obviously, there are degrees of integration. Maximal integration is achieved by the retarded person who lives in an ordinary family setting in ordinary community housing, who moves and communicates in ways typical for his age, limited though they may be, and who utilizes, in typical ways, typical community resources such as schools, churches, hospitals and clinics, bowling alleys, swimming pools, and job placements. For others, this pattern of maximal integration is not feasible; they are in need of one or more specialized services, and must be restricted in certain ways or excluded from certain commonly enjoyed activities. The important and too frequently neglected point is that one restriction, exclusion, or limitation should not automatically invoke a host of others merely because this is in keeping with the perceived pattern of mental retardation.

Individualization is an essential feature of normalization and assures social approval while granting maximum integration into those normal life patterns of which a retarded person is capable at any given time. Individualization, in turn, requires recognition of basic human and individual patterns of growth and change, of the rise and wane of needs. Hence there must be provision for periodic review to make certain that services are not only instituted but also terminated in keeping with changes in needs.

We are finding increasingly that special grouping of retardates is not always necessary in order to meet special service needs. Thus, we are gradually moving away from the traditional concept of special education via segregation, and toward a concept of special education which utilizes to the maximum possible extent regular public school and other educational services, and which provides special instruction to meet special needs with a minimum of segregation.

Dispersal

Here, one of Nirje's principles is of the utmost importance: every effort should be made not to congregate deviants in numbers larger than the surrounding community can absorb and integrate. Among other things, this principle implies that a large number of small facilities should be developed and dispersed, not only so that there are residences in the various population centers of a state but so that these residences are dispersed within these communities.

Obviously, neighborhoods will differ in regard to what they can absorb. In all likelihood, upper lower-class neighborhoods of medium density population and with a large array of resources (post office, library, churches, playgrounds, movies, stores, etc.) will be capable of absorbing mentally retarded persons at a high rate. Thinly populated upper-class suburban areas beyond easy walking distance from community resources would probably be least suited.

Dispersal is also likely to enhance rehabilitation. First, normalizing opportunities associated with dispersal are likely to increase social skills, in contrast to habilitation programs in institutions where each habilitative measure is likely to be counteracted by powerful abnormalizing and dehumanizing conditions. Second, dispersal permits placement of residences near industry and work opportunities, again in contrast to many institutions which either have more residents than surrounding business can absorb in unskilled and semiskilled jobs or are located far from employment opportunities in general.

Specialization

Dispersal is difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve without specialization of residential functions. It is inconceivable that a small residence in a neighborhood could adequately and simultaneously serve all those functions that the traditional institution serves. In other words, a small residence could not serve both the newborn infant and the senescent, the mildly and the profoundly impaired, the well-socialized and the ill-socialized. Nor, as pointed out by Wolfensberger, Nirje, Tizard, and Dunn, is it desirable to perform omnibus functions in one residence even if one could.

Dispersal not only serves the principle of normalization but, as Dunn has so well analyzed, it also opens up new possibilies -sic- for manpower utilization and economy. Particularly in urban areas, it will be possible to draw from such a large number of retardates needing residential service that hostels with very strongly focused functions and very homogeneous resident groups can be constituted. Thus, many hostels can specialize on becoming inexpensive "sleeping homes." Others could house residents who stay only from Monday through Friday, and who return to their families on weekends. In addition, there can be hostels where resident children attend ordinary community schools during the day, or where resident adults go to regular or sheltered jobs in the daytime. But school attendance and ability to work in the community in open or sheltered employment are by no means necessary prerequisites for hostel living. As Denmark has long proven, aged and infirm adults can also profit from this normalization, provided they do not have acute medical and nursing needs. In short, a considerable portion of the institutionalized population in the United States could fit into this scheme if the necessary community services (schooling, employment, leisure-time activities, day care) were developed concomitantly.