Speaker: Tim Liao, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract: The application of sequence analysis (SA) in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a life course analogy, I examine in this talk the birth of SA in the social sciences and its childhood (the first wave), its adolescence and young adulthood (the second wave), and its future mature adulthood in the paper. The talk provides a summary of (1) the important SA research and the historical contexts in which SA was developed by Andrew Abbott, (2) a brief review of the manymethodological developments in visualization, complexity measures, dissimilarity measures, group analysis of dissimilarities, cluster analysis of dissimilarities, multidomain/multichannel SA, dyadic/polyadic SA, Markov chain SA, sequence life course analysis, sequence network analysis, SA in other social science research, and software for SA, and (3) reflections on some future directions of SA including themethods currently being developed, and some remaining challenges facing SA for which we do not yet have any solutions. The talk builds on this recently published paper in Social Science Research.
