International audienceYouth is often depicted as a transition from childhood to adulthood in the familial, residential and occupational domains. This approach brings in the idea of thresholds, such as leaving the parental home, getting married, having a first child or having a stable job. In practice, it has the advantage of allowing relatively simple comparisons of pathways to adulthood in time and space. However the study of thresholds has several limitations. First, it masks the problem of the reversibility of events, their non-occurrence and the difficulty of defining clearly bounded markers. Second, it barely apprehends the links between the familial, residential and occupational domains. Finally, it produces aggregated outcomes, partly ignoring the heterogeneity of individual processes of transition to adulthood. This work attempts to overcome these limitations by tackling pathways to adulthood in France through trajectory typologies built by means of optimal matching analysis techniques

International audienceCultural eclecticism has been the focus of most sociological debates pertaining to cultural practices since the publication of Richard Peterson's first articles on the topic. Underlying these debates surrounding results, the prevailing definitions and methods are particularly striking for their… eclecticism. And although it is not explicitly stated, it appears that sociologists disagree over the parameters of inquiry – how the object of study is constructed and all manner of methodologies, rather than over hypotheses and whether or not they are valid. In this paper, we shall extend and systematize assertions that appear in various works on omnivorousness. Our aim is to determine the theoretical implications of the three groups of choices that seem critical in statistical methods of studying cultural eclecticism: choices concerning indicators of taste; methods of constructing a scale of cultural legitimacy; and indicators of cultural omnivorousness

The use of sequence analysis in the social sciences has significantly increased during the last decade or two. Sequence analysis explores and describes trajectories and “fishes for patterns” (Abbott, 2000). Many dissimilarity metrics exist in various domains (bioinformatics, data mining, etc.); therefore a crucial and pervasive issue in papers using sequence analysis is robustness. To what extent do the various techniques lead to consistent and converging results? What kinds of patterns are more easily fished out by each of the metrics? Here we propose a systematic comparison of about ten metrics that have been used in the social science literature, based on the examination of dissimilarity matrices computed from a simulated sequence data set including various patterns that sociologists can try to identify. This should help scholars in picking the method best suited to their data design and inquiry objectives.