Special education transition issues over the past 60 years: social network analysis on Web of Science exploration

Abstract

This research identified the potential special education transition development trajectories by tracing the priorities and hierarchical structure of published transition issues in special education. Social network analysis (SNA) of the 1900–2015 data from the Web of Science (WOS) database achieves a transition exploration flow by citation-based main path analysis (MPA). The first main finding was that 517 papers were published relating to special education transition over the past 60 years. Special education transition literature emerged in 1957, was systematically explored after 1987, and grew rapidly in the 1990s. The second main finding was that the trajectories contained various topics that can be broken down into two mainstream fields: curriculum and employment. The third main finding was that there are five sub-branches of the mainstream fields: legislation; team working; accountability; individualised transition programmes (ITP); and self-determination. This research is the first to use MPA techniques in SNA for special education transition. The findings indicate that more foci deserve to be explored to attain the transition working exhaustively and smooth transitions between each career stage for individuals with disabilities.

Keywords:

• main path analysis (MPA)
• social network analysis (SNA)
• special education
• transition
• Web of Science (WOS)

Acknowledgements

The researcher would like to express sincere thanks to the Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C. for funding this research (MOST106-2410-H-182-012) and editors and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments over the review process. The researcher especially would like to express appreciation to Professor Dr. Bruce J Y Lin for his assistance in statistics working.