This workshop is offered to Life Course Centre members only.
Sequence analysis is a methodological framework aiming to study trajectories described as sequences of categorical states, such as familial or professional trajectories. It is increasingly used to study trajectories and is often considered a key method for life-course research, but its use expands to many other disciplines, including geography, activities in space-time, digital traces, time use studies, career research, or healthcare trajectories, to name a few.
The standard use of SA revolves around the creation of a typology of trajectories with cluster analysis. This typology allows the identification of recurrent patterns or, in other words, typical successions of states through which the trajectories run. By doing so, it provides a holistic perspective on the trajectories. It then further allows to identify the profiles of trajectories linked to each type of trajectory, for instance, to highlight at-risk profiles or between group inequalities.
This methodological workshop provides a 6-period course on sequence analysis. It is intended for a large audience, starting with a general overview of sequence analysis in the social sciences and epidemiology and the characterization of trajectories in a life course perspective. It then presents descriptive and visualization methods, before moving to the creation of a typology of trajectories focusing on the different choices to be made (cluster algorithms, distance measures, cluster quality measures). Each theoretical presentation is followed by practical sessions on how to run the presented analyses using R, TraMineR,and WeightedCluster.