Advances in Sequence Analysis: Theory, Method, Applications

Abstract

Life course research has been developing quickly these last decades for good reasons. Life course approaches focus on essential questions about individuals' trajectories, longitudinal analyses, cross-fertilization across disciplines like life-span psychology, developmental social psychology, sociology of the life course, social demography, socio-economics, social history. Life course is also at the crossroads of several fields of specialization like family and social relationships, migration, education, professional training and employment, and health. This Series invites academic scholars to present theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in the analysis of the life course, and to elaborate on possible implications for society and social policies applications.For further volumes:

The life course determinants of vulnerability in late careers

“…This technique creates The method used to measure these distances is optimal matching analysis (OMA). In order to calculate those distances we used specifically the constant substitution costs of 2 and indel costs of 1 to balance the importance of the order of statuses and the timing of changes between statuses in each kind of sequence (Blanchard, Bühlmann, & Gauthier, 2014). It is possible to perform a cluster analysis on the resulting distance matrix, which allows homogeneous groups of sequences to be created, which, taken together, represent types of trajectories (Blanchard et al, 2014).…”

“…In order to calculate those distances we used specifically the constant substitution costs of 2 and indel costs of 1 to balance the importance of the order of statuses and the timing of changes between statuses in each kind of sequence (Blanchard, Bühlmann, & Gauthier, 2014). It is possible to perform a cluster analysis on the resulting distance matrix, which allows homogeneous groups of sequences to be created, which, taken together, represent types of trajectories (Blanchard et al, 2014). The clustering method used to agglomerate trajectory types was 'Ward' (Ward, 1963), and the average silhouette width higher than 0.5 as the cut-off criterion of trajectory types was used (Kaufman & Rousseeuw, 1990).…”

Sequence Analysis of Life History Data

“…This chapter provides a gentle introduction to the main concepts and ideas of sequence analysis and illustrates some applications in the field of epidemiology and sociology from a life course perspective, without going into too much technical detail. More in-depth information, as well as a broader discussion of the key concepts of sequence analysis, can be found in Blanchard et al (2014) and Cornwall (2014).…”

Mixture Hidden Markov Models for Sequence Data: The seqHMM Package in R

“…Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison 1998), but during the past few decades SA has also become more common in other disciplines for the analysis of longitudinal data. In social sciences SA has been used increasingly often and is now "central to the life-course perspective" (Blanchard, Bühlmann, and Gauthier 2014).…”