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Visualizing Sequences in the Social Sciences

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  • Anette Eva Fasang
  • Tim Futing Liao

Abstract

Visualization is a potentially powerful tool for exploration and complexity reduction of categorical sequence data. This article discusses currently available sequence visualization against established criteria for graphical excellence in the visual display of quantitative information. Existing sequence graphs fall into two groups: They either represent categorical sequences or summarize them. The authors propose relative frequency sequence plots as an informative way of graphing sequence data and as a bridge between data representation graphs and data summarization graphs. The efficacy of the proposed plot is assessed by the R 2 and the F statistics. The applicability of the proposed graphs is demonstrated using data from the German Life History Study on women’s family formation.

Suggested Citation

  • Anette Eva Fasang & Tim Futing Liao, 2014. "Visualizing Sequences in the Social Sciences," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 43(4), pages 643-676, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:somere:v:43:y:2014:i:4:p:643-676
    DOI: 10.1177/0049124113506563
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Raffaella Piccarreta & Orna Lior, 2010. "Exploring sequences: a graphical tool based on multi‐dimensional scaling," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 173(1), pages 165-184, January.
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    7. Anette E. Fasang, 2010. "Retirement: Institutional Pathways and Individual Trajectories in Britain and Germany," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 15(2), pages 1-16, May.
    8. Gabadinho, Alexis & Ritschard, Gilbert & Müller, Nicolas S & Studer, Matthias, 2011. "Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 40(i04).
    9. Raffaella Piccarreta & Francesco C. Billari, 2007. "Clustering work and family trajectories by using a divisive algorithm," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 170(4), pages 1061-1078, October.
    10. Zeileis, Achim & Hornik, Kurt & Murrell, Paul, 2009. "Escaping RGBland: Selecting colors for statistical graphics," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 53(9), pages 3259-3270, July.
    11. Arnstein Aassve & Francesco C. Billari & Raffaella Piccarreta, 2007. "Strings of Adulthood: A Sequence Analysis of Young British Women’s Work-Family Trajectories," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 23(3), pages 369-388, October.
    12. Matthias Studer & Gilbert Ritschard & Alexis Gabadinho & Nicolas S. Müller, 2011. "Discrepancy Analysis of State Sequences," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 40(3), pages 471-510, August.
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    Cited by:

    1. Jalovaara, Marika & Fasang, Anette Eva, 2017. "From never partnered to serial cohabitors: union trajectories to childlessness," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 36, pages 1703-1720.
    2. Piccarreta, Raffaella & Bonetti, Marco, 2019. "Assessing and comparing models for sequence data by microsimulation (with Supplementary Material)," SocArXiv 3mcfp, Center for Open Science.

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