A representation of students with intellectual disabilities in South Korean online newspaper articles using keyword network analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyse online newspaper articles on students with intellectual disabilities (IDs) in order to identify related social phenomena to derive implications for inclusive education. Such study has traditionally practised through content analysis and/or discourse analysis manually, which is prone to subjective interpretation. Thus, this study implemented automated analysis to objectively select and interpret a big data. A total of 8,890 online newspaper articles that were published from 1990 to April 2019 were collected through automated parsing. The entire period and decade-phase based keyword and keyword network analysis were practised in order to determine how the social perceptions and related issues had changed over time. The results indicated that there was a rapid growth in scope of articles on students with IDs over the past 30 years. The attention of media gradually expanded from special education to improving quality of lives of students with IDs and their families. Moreover, online newspaper articles seemed to focus on social controversies and incidents such as sexual assaults that are related to students with IDs. Based on the results, ways to support inclusive education as well as social inclusion of students with IDs were discussed.

Keywords:

• intellectual disabilities
• online newspaper articles
• media
• inclusive education
• analysis
• network analysis
• big data
• computational social science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.