Step into adulthood: exploring transition experiences of young adults with disabilities through a narrative inquiry

Transition to adulthood represents the transition to specific adult roles and responsibilities in close connection with life contexts. The literature in this area calls this phase emerging adulthood highlighting its complexity, uncertainty and problematic traits (Arnett, 2004). This process turns out to be more critical for persons with disabilities for whom, even today, the end of school is configured as a "leap into the void" urging for specific planning. The upper secondary school and the local services that act with it therefore play a crucial role in building this transition phase. This contribution illustrates the outcomes of the exploratory phase of the STrADE project aimed at designing and experimenting a model of transition to adulthood that favors students with disabilities the acquisition of transversal and professional skills from a life plan perspective. For this purpose, the voices of young persons with disabilities and their families were collected through narrative-biographical interviews (Muylaert et al., 2014) and analyzed according to the criteria of thematic analysis (Green, Thorogood, 2004) in order to highlight the main personal/environmental factors characterizing the transition paths of students with disabilities as well as facilitators/barriers that have influenced the construction of their adulthood.