Investigation of doctoral dissertations in special education in Turkey

Abstract

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