CONTROVERSIES ABOUT how to discipline children are of concern to parents, other adults who care for children, clinicians, and policymakers. There are disparate views about some aspects of the advisability and effects of different forms of discipline and substantial variability in the amount and quality of the research that informs these opinions. To address these issues, a conference—Research on Discipline: The State of the Art, Deficits, and Implications—was sponsored by the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Family and Child Well-being Research Network, Chapel Hill, NC, April 25-26, 1996. The focus of the conference was on discipline research conceptualization, methodology, issues of causality, outcomes, and interventions. The aim was to review what we may conclude from previous work and to identify deficits that might be addressed in future research. Three of the papers from the conference are presented in this issue of the Archives. We highlight herein some