New Life for Old Ideas: The "Second Wave" of Sequence Analysis Bringing the "Course" Back Into the Life Course

Abstract

In this article the authors draw attention to the most recent and promising developments of sequence analysis. Taking methodological developments in life course sociology as the starting point, the authors detail the complementary strength in sequence analysis in this field. They argue that recent advantages of sequence analysis were developed in response to criticism of the original work, particularly optimal matching analysis. This debate arose over the past two decades and culminated in the 2000 exchange in Sociological Methods & Research. The debate triggered a "second wave" of sequence techniques that led to new technical implementations of old ideas in sequence analysis. The authors bring these new technical approaches together, demonstrate selected advances with synthetic example data, and show how they conceptually contribute to life course research. This article demonstrates that in less than a decade, the field has made much progress toward fulfilling the prediction that Andrew Abbott made in 2000, that "anybody who believes that pattern search techniques are not going to be basic to social sciences over the next 25 years is going to be very much surprised" (p. 75).