Impact of Research About the Early Development of Children With Intellectual Disability: A Science Mapping Analysis

Carlo Schuengel,Richard P Hastings,Catherine E Stanford,Maaike M Van Rest

doi:10.3389/feduc.2019.00041

Abstract

The “Warnock Report” (Department for Education and Science, 1978) underlined the importance of early intervention for children with a range of special educational needs and the importance of partnership with families. This paper focuses on young children with intellectual disability to describe the longitudinal research on early development that has emerged since the report, and to describe the scholarly literature that has been impacted by this longitudinal work. First, we conducted a systematic literature search for primary reports of longitudinal studies on the early development of children with intellectual disability. Included studies were those that measured dependent (i.e., developmental outcomes) and independent variables (i.e., risk and resilience factors) on at least two measurement occasions (i.e., truly longitudinal), starting before the end of the 7th year of life, with samples including children with intellectual disability (or related terms). The topics of these studies, and of the publications that have cited these longitudinal studies, were extracted from titles and abstracts using machine reading and subjected to multidimensional clustering (VOSviewer; Van Eck and Waltman, 2016). The resulting body of 101 research studies (about 2.5 studies per year) covered a scattering of topics without a dominant focus. The literature that was impacted by these longitudinal studies consisted of 3,491 scientific publications. Three clusters of topics emerged from mapping the terms used in these publications, which were dominated by (1) syndrome and disorder related terms; (2) autism-related terms; and (3) disability and parent related terms. Topics related to autism and, to a lesser extent, parents showed the strongest increase over time. Topics related to intervention and programmes were mostly linked to the topics disability and parents. Taking into account the science mapping as well as features of the context in which research on intellectual disability takes place, we suggest a collaborative research agenda that systematically links topics relevant for intervention with longitudinal research, in co-creation with families.

Highlights

Intellectual Disability is described in ICD-11 as a Disorder of Intellectual Development (Salvador-Carulla et al, 2011)
Science mapping study, we have argued for the importance of basing early interventions for children with intellectual disability on the foundations of high quality developmental research
Mapping the use of early development research in intellectual disability, we found only moderate evidence of links to research on intervention and arguably a concerning disconnection

Summary

Introduction

Intellectual Disability is described in ICD-11 as a Disorder of Intellectual Development (Salvador-Carulla et al, 2011). Children with an intellectual disability have historically been given a variety of labels including “mental retardation,” “mental handicap,” and “subnormal.” While internationally the term intellectual disability is favored, terminology in the UK education system was heavily influenced by the report of the committee led by baroness Warnock on special educational needs (Department for Education and Science, 1978), which proposed to use “learning difficulties” as the generic term (with some distinction of severity in mild, moderate, or severe). Publications like the Warnock report have shifted the social construction of having an intellectual disability and enhanced awareness of critical needs in a significant group in our society. Charting those needs is one of the tasks that researchers in the field have undertaken

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