Have you ever wondered why or how researchers categorize people into different groups? Of course, there are specific types of groups you might first think of, such as differentiating people by race, gender, income level, marital status, and education. However, there are a variety of other types of groups that researchers might find interesting that you may not be aware of. For instance, some researchers are interested in studying people based on patterns of their activities over a span of time. An example of this would be if a researcher was interested in studying the differences between types of offenders. For example, each time they were: 1) expelled or suspended from school, 2) arrested, 3) convicted, and 4) incarcerated. There are other variables a researcher might also find to be important: periods of 1) homelessness, 2) unemployment, 3) graduation from high school and 4) marriage.
This might seem like a very daunting task: to categorize people based on all the possible sequences of events that happened in their lives. And it is. However, researchers have tried to find more efficient methods of categorizing people into groups. One relatively newer method of determining groups uses a computer program to examine how many different sequences of events across time exist in a sample of subjects. This method is called sequence analysis. Sequence analysis for social science research had its origins in the study of evolutionary patterns and modes of descent of DNA molecules, initially (and still) carried out by biologists. However, social scientists have co-opted this method for social sequence analysis, in which they study patterns of events. The use of this term in this blog post, therefore, refers specifically to identifying patterns of events based on their classification into different categories and the specific ordering of the events. [1] (more…)