Cornwell stops at every station along what is arguably the most important pathway for gaining insight into the social world with elegant methodological contributions that should change how we do social science. ‘Social Sequence Analysis beautifully links two of the major revolutionary developments in social science over the past three decades - networks and sequences - to make sense of the deeply ordered nature of social life. Laurent Lesnard - CNRS Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po, France Benjamin Cornwell has written a much-needed book that should prove invaluable to social scientists interested in sequence analysis.' for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis, and all those working in sociology. It provides useful guidance into the different families of statistical methods adapted to sequences that emerged in the social sciences a couple of decades ago. Sequence Analysis and Related Approaches. ‘Social Sequence Analysis: Methods and Applications offers the first comprehensive look at sequence analysis for the social sciences. Keohane Professor of Sociology, Duke University Well written, clearly argued, and filled with practical guides, this is a methods text for all thinking social scientists.' This book provides the tools needed to think about social sequences in a grounded, pragmatic fashion in a way that opens new doors for social theory. Taking up the charge first raised by Andrew Abbott many years ago, this book provides a careful and detailed examination of the history and theoretical grounding of sequence methods in the social sciences. ‘Social Sequence Analysis is a must-read book for anyone interested in the temporal unfolding of social events. Swift Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Essential reading for researchers in sociology and related social sciences.'Īndrew Abbott - Gustavus F. On the other hand, by identifying relevant and open methodological challenges, we highlight and encourage promising directions for future research.‘Social Sequence Analysis is the first comprehensive conceptual, theoretical, and methodological overview of an important and interdisciplinary research paradigm.
On one hand, we aim to provide social scientists with indications for informed methodological choices and to emphasize issues that require consideration for proper application of the described approaches. funded by a +3 Scholarship provided by the Economic and Social Research Council. We then move to some model-based approaches (included in the broad classes of multistate and of mixture latent Markov models) that further weaken the holistic perspective, assuming that the difficult task of predicting and explaining trajectories can be simplified by focusing on the collection of observed transitions. Life course methodology, sequence analysis, latent class growth models. We describe some recent developments combining SA and Event History Analysis, and illustrate how weakening the holistic perspective-focusing on sub-trajectories-might result in a more flexible analysis of life courses. We discuss the inherent problems arising in SA, particularly in the study of the relationship between trajectories and covariates. We begin by considering sequence analysis (SA), one of the most established holistic approaches. We survey state-of-the-art approaches to study trajectories in their entirety, adopting a holistic perspective, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.