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Member rate £492.50
Non-Member rate £985.00
Save £45 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
* If you attended our Methods School during the calendar years 2024 or 2025, you qualify for £45 off your course fee.
Monday 5 to Friday 9 March 2018
09:00-12:30
15 hours over 5 days
Sequence analysis is the systematic descriptive and causal study of sequences, that is, successions of standard categorical states or events. Sequence analysis is a unique method for representing, comparing and clustering sequences, for extracting prototypical sequences and for mining sequence populations. Its core tool, the optimal matching algorithm, imported from genetics and bio-computing, screens and discriminates longitudinal processes according to the nature of events, their duration and their order.
Numerous fields in the social and political sciences are concerned with sequences, for example: life course analysis (e.g. family and residential transition from youth to adulthood), sociology of professional careers (such as gendered careers or transition to retirement), political sociology (elite and activist careers), evolution of regimes (stages of development or transition to democracy), speech analysis (rhetorical strategies), geopolitics (stages in crises or democratic transition), comparative studies (stages of diffusion of reforms or mobilizations), elections (stages of public opinion formation during campaigns), human geography (distribution of space occupation from city centre) and ethnographic practices (rituals).
Tasks for ECTS Credits
The following tasks will be proposed:
Philippe Blanchard, University of Warwick, works on green politics, political communication, and methods for social and political sciences: multivariate statistics, longitudinal methods, interviewing, content analysis and digital data. He has taught methods in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.
He is currently director of Warwick's BA in Politics, International Studies and Quantitative Methods and MA in Politics, Big Data & Quantitative Methods.
Philippe is the Chair of the ECPR Methods School Academic Advisory Board.
Sequence analysis (SA) is the systematic descriptive and causal study of sequences, that is, successions of standard states or events. It is a unique method for representing, comparing and clustering sequences, for extracting prototypical sequences, for describing groups of sequences and mining sequence populations. Its core tool, the optimal matching algorithm, imported from genetics and bio-computing, screens and discriminates longitudinal processes according to the nature of events, their duration and their order.
The course will be both theoretical and practical. A project will be provided by the instructor as a running example throughout the course. For participants who come with their own data and/or who have a precise research project in mind, the course will provide some help to set up a treatment strategy and to articulate SA with other methods.
The course is mainly designed for beginners in sequences, but researchers who have already used R or Stata on sequences may attend so as to improve their theoretical and/or practical knowledge, as well as take advantage of the confrontation with varied fieldworks from students and instructor.
Participants will be invited to do exercises on their own or by pairs if level or fieldwork match. Students are invited to bring their own laptop and to install R prior to the course (http://cran.r-project.org/), as well as the following packages: boot, cluster, colorspace, foreign, graphics, RcolorBrewer, rgrs and TraMineR. All kinds of hardware and operating systems fit.
The course is made of the following sections. Each might be developed more or less, according to the needs of the audience.
Sequence analysis is still an emerging method in the field of political science and social sciences at large. If you wonder about its usefulness for your own research project, do not hesitate to contact the instructor.
Two prior knowledges are requested:
| Day | Topic | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Definitions and principles | |
| Tuesday | Review and preparation of sequence data |
Hands-on session 1 |
| Wednesday | Case study. Optimal matching (1) |
Hands-on session 2 |
| Thursday | How to make the best use of optimal matching |
Hands-on session 3 |
| Friday | Treatment of OM outputs |
Hands-on session 4 |
| Day | Readings |
|---|---|
|
Participants should choose their priority readings in the list below according to their disiciplinary interests. However all recommended readings are representative of some aspects of the method that are useful for all disciplines. It is strongly recommended to start reading before the course kicks off, so that you may focus during the course on exercises and in-class discussions. |
|
| Monday |
Compulsory
Optional
|
| Tuesday |
Compulsory
Optional
see http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html for more possibilities, in several languages. |
| Wednesday |
Compulsory
Optional
|
| Thursday |
Compulsory
Optional
|
| Friday |
Compulsory
Optional
|
R plus the following packages (to be installed prior to the course): boot, cluster, colorspace, foreign, graphics, RcolorBrewer, questionr and TraMineR.
Participants to bring own laptops
See 'Optional readings' in Day to Day Readings list above.
Summer School
Introduction to R
Data management with R
Winter School
Introduction to R
Introduction to Statistics for Political and Social Scientists
Summer School
Intermediate R