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The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a scale for the evaluation of the perceived quality of services provided to students with disabilities by Special Vocational Education (SVE) institutions in Greece.

SVE service quality was approached on the basis of the performance-only model. The participatory research paradigm was followed, engaging students with disability and specifically with intellectual disability in several stages of the instrument development. The methodological design included two phases for the establishment and testing of the reliability and validity of the scale.

The findings of the study support a multifactorial construct of SVE service quality consisting of five factors: responsiveness, surroundings, personalization, training and facilities adequacy.

Generalization of results should be attempted with concern. The type and severity of disability should be considered in future use of the scale. The construct of training for students with disability needs to be further investigated.

SVE-Service-Quality Scale may be used in SVE settings highlighting areas of improvement or as an instrument for the assessment of implemented interventions.

Participatory research may serve as an empowerment opportunity for students with disability, whose active engagement in the research design allows for a small-scale yet valuable social impact, promoting emancipation for people with disability.

The study draws attention on the field of SVE service quality where research is scarce, introducing SVE in the discussion about educational service quality assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the transnational discourse on the migrant crisis materialized on Twitter; it analyses how different stakeholders make use of online platforms to engage in the transnational digital public sphere in a crisis context.

The case study combines insights from research on transnational public discourses with web sphere theory for the methodological angle; it also applies social network and semantic analysis as empirical methods for data analysis. Twitter data related to #migrantcrisis and published on the 26 of February 2016 were collected, processed and visualised with NodeXL.

The social network and semantic analysis of 4,277 tweets identified the key actors/stakeholders who dominated the transnational web discourse and the main topics subsumed under the #migrantcrisis. The results suggest that the hierarchical structures that shaped the “offline” public sphere resonate in the digital public sphere. Simultaneously, strong links with general EU politics and other crisis events that caused turmoil in the transnational public sphere emerged as well.

The paper provides an exploratory mapping of noticeable tendencies in a data set that is limited to the 26 of February 2016, which marked the closing of borders along the so-called “Balkan Route” to Europe.

This paper examines the usage of Twitter and the formation of the transnational web discourse by focusing the examination of a key date and event as regards to the unfolding of the migrant crisis in Europe.