User Training – Sequence Analysis in R using the GGS

5th July – WZB, Berlin

The methodological workshop provided a one-day introduction to sequence analysis, a methodological framework to study sequences (or trajectories) of categorical states, such as familial or professional trajectories. The workshop began with a global overview of the uses of sequences analysis in the social sciences before providing a practical introduction on how to run the analysis in R with TraMineR using examples from GGS data. After a short introduction to R, methods available to describe and visualize sets of sequences of categorical states were reviewed. The creation of a typology of trajectories was then discussed.

Bio of the instructor

Matthias Studer is Senior Researcher at the Swiss NCCR program “LIVES overcoming vulnerability: life course perspectives,” and is one of the developers of the TraMineR, an R library for sequence analysis. His research interests include sequence analysis, gendered career inequalities, labor market and social policy evaluation. He published several papers on sequences analysis in international journal such as in Sociological Methods and Research, and more recently a comparison of sequence analysis distance measures in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A.

The course was mainly based on the following articles:

Gabadinho, A., G. Ritschard, N. S. Müller and M. Studer (2011). Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR. Journal of Statistical Software 40 (4), 1-37.

Studer, M. (2013).WeightedCluster library manual: A practical guide to creating typologies of trajectories in the social sciences with R. LIVES Working Papers 24, NCCR LIVES, Switzerland.

Studer, M. and Ritschard, G. (2016), What matters in differences between life trajectories: a comparative review of sequence dissimilarity measures. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 179: 481–511. doi:10.1111/rssa.12125