The study of social processes — such as educational pathways, healthcare use trajectories, or family formation — often involves categorical data unfolding over time. As such longitudinal data becomes increasingly available, sequence analysis has emerged as a powerful tool for capturing and analyzing these trajectories holistically. Introduced to the social sciences by Andrew Abbott in the 1990s, sequence analysis offers a framework for visualizing, classifying, and explaining patterns in life-course data.
This presentation provides a general introduction to sequence analysis, situating it within the broader landscape of longitudinal methods. Drawing on examples from education and school-to-work transitions in Switzerland, it emphasizes the added value of sequence analysis for life-course research, outlines key methodological choices, and reviews recent developments, while discussing the strengths and limitations of the approach.
About the Speaker
Matthias Studer is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a member of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research (LIVES). He is currently a visiting scholar at the Life Course Centre, hosted by The University of Queensland. His current research focuses on sequence analysis, school-to-work transition, labor market dynamics and pathways within the social security system. He is a key developer of the R package TraMineR and the maintainer of WeightedCluster, the most used softwares for sequence analysis. His work has shaped best practice in the field, notably the comparative review of sequence dissimilarity measures and the development of robust methods. He actively contributed to the dissemination of these methods through software development, workshops, and conferences. In recognition of these contributions, he received the Harvey Goldstein Memorial Award from the Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies in 2025.