The book aims at collecting recent developments in sequence analysis, an exploratory method for ordered categorical data, which has found its way from Biology into the Social Sciences since the late 1980s. It collects the most important contributions of the “International Conference on Sequence Analysis and Related Methods” that took place in Lausanne in 2016, where the editors attracted many of the established researchers in this field plus a couple of those researchers who were quite new to this method. The edited volume makes a couple of valuable contributions to the field. Regarding the development of the method over time, the book is at the frontier and focusses on the most pressing questions regarding its further development. As Ritschard/Studer formulate in the introductory chapter, these are the combination with other methods (Parts II, III & IV), grouping procedures (Part V) and visualization of complexity. The latter topic is not treated in a particular chapter, but addressed throughout the book. For this purpose, it is very helpful that graphs in this volume are presented in colour print. In addition, the book provides two articles (Part VI) dealing with how sequence information can be used in order to construct meaningful indicators about longitudinal processes. An important topic remaining untouched in this edited volume is treatment of missing values of truncation. But, as the editors themselves correctly do mention, there is hardly any solution available until now.
Among the strongest aspects of this book are the multifaceted connections to a range of other quantitative methods, such as event history analysis, network analysis, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), and Markov chains. These connections are without exception innovative and necessary for increasing the establishment of the method. Studer’s chapter about divisive property-based and fuzzy clustering also closes an important gap and the chapters of Part VI (Manzoni/Mooi-Reci and Ritschard/Bussi/O’Reilly) sustainably contribute to a structured use of sequence information. Additionally, by the large variety of the example topics, the book shows highly diverse fields in which sequence analysis may be applied to, such as French pastry cooks, relational networks in Togo, employment precarity in Europe or gender differences in managerial positions—just to name a few. The volume shows very well the interdisciplinary applicability of sequence analysis.
The degree of integration of the single chapters, however, is not too high. This becomes apparent in the very low number of cross-references to the other chapters in the book one the one hand and the different style of the chapters, on the other: One finds a synopsis of method-related discussions, generic research articles, extensive quantitative method chapters and textbook articles with programming examples beside each other. If readers intend to read the whole book (what everyone interested in the topic should do), this is a quite a demanding task.
The first chapter (Courgeau) is probably most interesting for researchers with a demography background than for researchers from other disciplines, because the application of the method in this chapter is quite discipline-specific. The second chapter (Eerola) summarizes three studies in a brief way, and comes to the main conclusion that sequence analysis is strong in exploration but weak in causal analysis. This is not really a new finding, but the chapter provides a nice start for readers new to sequence analysis. The first two chapters of Part II (Malin/Wise and Lundevaller et al.) are particularly well-done research papers that aim at representing different degrees of integration between sequence analysis and event history analysis. The chapter of Rossignon et al. provides a clever solution for the integration of past trajectories as explanatory variables for later events. The two chapter of Part III (Cornwell; Hamberger) present the sequence network approach, which is quite new field of application for sequence analysis. These two chapters are quite demanding and readers are referred to Cornwell’s textbook (Cornwell 2015) in which some of the basic concepts are introduced. The three chapters of Part IV show very good examples for method combinations and mixed-method designs. The lack of a genuine chapter on visualization issues is a little pity, because it is an important topic as the editors mention themselves in the introduction. One or two special chapters on that topic would be more satisfying and provide the chance of connecting it to theoretical issues of graph perception (cp. Cleveland 1994).
The book will be interesting for methodologically interested researchers of many different disciplines that are interested in longitudinal research, such as demography, sociology, psychology, educational science, health research, political science, maybe also economics. Apart from that, sequence analysis reaches out to quantitative as well as qualitative researchers. This book remarks the final position in the series on books dealing with sequence analysis. The texts of Blanchard et al. (2014) and Cornwell (2015) constitute a beginning of textbooks on sequence analysis. This edited volume might serve the basic literature for an advanced course on sequence analysis, since sequence analysis is close to entering the canonical basis of quantitative social science methods.
Footnotes
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References
- Blanchard P, Bühlmann F, Gauthier J-A. Advances in sequence analysis: Theory, method, applications. Heidelberg: Springer; 2014. [Google Scholar]
- Cleveland WS. The elements of graphing data. Summit, New Jersey: Hobart Press; 1994. [Google Scholar]
- Cornwell B. Social sequence analysis. Methods and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015. [Google Scholar]