Investigation of doctoral dissertations in special education in Turkey

Abstract

This research is a descriptive study aims to investigate doctoral thesis in special education in terms of various variables. 183 doctoral thesis completed from 1989 to 2017 in special education branch have been gained by searching the thesis center of Council of Higher Education. In order to get descriptive information about doctoral thesis included in the research the technique of document analyzing has been used. The findings obtained at the end of the research have exposed that the subject of intellectual disability was studied most in the thesis, “single subject design” was preferred mostly and a large part of the thesis was completed in Anadolu University. Also, according to the findings it has been revealed that in parallel with the developments in special education the number of thesis has been increasing in late years and more than half of all thesis were completed after 2011. These findings were discussed in the context of special education’s development.