November, 2 — Regular Seminar
Topic: Using Sequence Analysis in Comparative Studies
Speaker: Ekaterina Mitrofanova (PhD in Sociology, Associate Professor and Research Fellow at the Vishnevsky Institute of Demography, HSE University)
To convert events into statuses, we should set an “alphabet” containing all combination of events and calculate the alphabetic sequence of statuses for each point in time.
Such representation of life allows visualising it using special instrument called a chronogram. Along with a descriptive visual analysis (Gabadinho et al., 2011) we also can extract practical calculable information about statuses of each respondent at every year of his/her life and extract other useful measures (Elzinga, 2003, 2014). Results of Sequence Analysis can be used for clustering and classification (Barban & Billari, 2012; Piccarreta & Billari, 2007), can be combined with Event History Analysis (Helske et al., 2015; Rossignon et al., 2018), Machine Learning techniques (Billari et al., 2006; Dong & Pei, 2007) etc.
A comparative potential of Sequence Analysis is rich because it makes comparisons of countries, genders, generations etc. prominent and heuristic. The overview of such angles is represented in several papers of the author:
- Comparisons of countries, e.g., transition to adulthood in France, Estonia and Russia (Mitrofanova, 2017);
- Gender and generational comparisons in demographic behaviour, e.g. matrimonial (Mitrofanova & Artamonova, 2016) and migratory (Espy & Mitrofanova, 2017);
- Generational comparison inside one gender, e.g., live course events of men serving and not serving in the military (Mitrofanova & Artamonova, 2015);
- Development of gender and generational comparisons using Machine Learning techniques (Danil et al., 2019; Gizdatullin et al., 2017; Ignatov et al., 2015; Muratova et al., 2022);
- New methods of visualisation, including demographic Lexis grid (web-instrument).
Based on the listed research papers, we will cover the most pivotal methodological aspects of data preparation and applying Sequence Analysis in SPSS and R. We will compare several chronograms, discuss the novelty of this method, ways of its application and combination with other methods.
Everyone interested is invited!
Working language is English.
Ekaterina Mitrofanova
Associate Professor