This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states or events. It includes innovative contributions on life course studies, transitions into and out of employment, contemporaneous and historical careers, and political trajectories. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course perspective and the study of social processes more generally. This volume promotes the dialogue between approaches to sequence analysis that developed separately, within traditions contrasted in space and disciplines. It includes the latest developments in sequential concepts, coding, atypical datasets and time patterns, optimal matching and alternative algorithms, survey optimization, and visualization. Field studies include original sequential material related to parenting in 19th-century Belgium, higher education and work in Finland and Italy, family formation before and after German reunification, French Jews persecuted in occupied France, long-term trends in electoral participation, and regime democratization. Overall the book reassesses the classical uses of sequences and it promotes new ways of collecting, formatting, representing and processing them. The introduction provides basic sequential concepts and tools, as well as a history of the method. Chapters are presented in a way that is both accessible to the beginner and informative to the expert.

Sequence analysis (SA) was developed to study social processes that unfold over time as sequences of events. It has gained increasing attention as the availability of longitudinal data made it possible to address sequence-oriented questions. This volume introduces the basics of SA to guide practitioners and support instructors through the basic workflow of sequence analysis. In addition to the basics, this book outlines recent advances and innovations in SA. The presentation of statistical, substantive, and theoretical foundations is enriched by examples to help the reader understand the repercussions of specific analytical choices. The extensive ancillary material supports self-learning based on real-world survey data and research questions from the field of life course research. Data and code and a variety of additional resources to enrich the use of this book are available on an accompanying website.

This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions proposed in this book pay special attention to the combined use of SA and other methods for longitudinal data such as event history analysis, Markov modelling, and sequence network. The methodological contributions in this book include among others original propositions for measuring the precarity of work trajectories, Markov-based methods for clustering sequences, fuzzy and monothetic clustering of sequences, network-based SA, joint use of SA and hidden Markov models, and of SA and survival models. The applications cover the comparison of gendered occupational trajectories in Germany, the study of the changes in women market participation in Denmark, the study of typical day of dual-earner couples in Italy, of mobility patterns in Togo, of internet addiction in Switzerland, and of the quality of employment career after a first unemployment spell. As such this book provides a wealth of information for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis, and all those working in sociology, demography, economics, health, psychology, social policy, and statistics.

Mapping the genomic landscapes is one of the most exciting frontiers of science. We have the opportunity to reverse engineer the blueprints and the control systems of living organisms. Computational tools are key enablers in the deciphering process. This book provides an in-depth presentation of some of the important computational biology approaches to genomic sequence analysis. The first section of the book discusses methods for discovering patterns in DNA and RNA. This is followed by the second section that reflects on methods in various ways, including performance, usage and paradigms.

This volume of Theory and Method in Higher Education Research explores several timely topics including transnational approaches to higher education policy, universities contributions to society, data collection in higher education, virtual and blended research, and more.

Social sequence analysis includes a diverse and rapidly growing body of methods that social scientists have developed to help study complex ordered social processes, including chains of transitions, trajectories and other ordered phenomena. Social sequence analysis is not limited by content or time scale and can be used in many different fields, including sociology, communication, information science and psychology. Social Sequence Analysis aims to bring together both foundational and recent theoretical and methodological work on social sequences from the last thirty years. A unique reference book for a new generation of social scientists, this book will aid demographers who study life-course trajectories and family histories, sociologists who study career paths or work/family schedules, communication scholars and micro-sociologists who study conversation, interaction structures and small-group dynamics, as well as social epidemiologists.

In this book new mathematical and statistical techniques that permit more sophisticated analysis are refined and applied to questions of current concern in order to understand the forces that are driving the recent dramatic changes in family patterns. The areas examined include the impact of the evolving Second Demographic Transition, where complex patterns of gender dynamics and social change are re-orienting family life. New analyses of marriage, cohabitation, union dynamics, and union dissolution provide a fresh look at the changing family life cycle, emerging patterns of partner choice, and the impact of union dissolution on the life course. The demography of kinship is explored, and the importance of parity progression to the generation of the kinship web is highlighted. The methodology of population projections by family status is examined, and new results presented that demonstrate how recognizing family status advances long term policy objectives, especially with regard to children and the elderly. This book applies up-to-date methods to examine the demography of the family, and will be of value to sociologists, demographers, and all those who are interested in the family.

Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive yet compact A-Z for undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking research across the social sciences, featuring 71 entries that cover a wide range of concepts, methods, and theories. Each entry begins with an accessible introduction to a method, using real-world examples from a wide range of academic disciplines, before discussing the benefits and limitations of the approach, its current status in academic practice, and finally providing tips and advice for readers on when and how to apply the method in their own research. Wide ranging and interdisciplinary, the text covers both well-established concepts and emerging ideas, such as big data and network analysis, for qualitative and quantitative research methods. All entries feature extensive cross-referencing, providing ease of navigation and, pointing readers to related concepts, and to help build their overall understanding of research methods.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies, in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics, semantics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, interactional linguistics, natural language processing), in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English, German, different varieties of French, Indonesian, French Belgian Sign Language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names, language acquisition, second language learning, and various genres such as news articles, narratives, satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act, thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust, depending on the context.