Abstract
Due to its rapid technical development over the past two decades, sequence analysis has partly lost sight of its theoretical motivation in the social sciences as originally formulated by Andrew Abbott. How exactly is the sequential approach helping us to inform core theoretical debates in the social sciences? Taking the life course paradigm as a starting point, this chapter argues that insights gained from sequence analysis can uniquely contribute to three theoretical concerns in family formation research: First, multidimensional lives, that is primarily the study of parallel family and employment trajectories; second, linked lives, i.e. how family formation unfolds in the context of networks of shared relationships; and third, how macro-structural contexts shape the de-standardization and pluralization of family formation. This chapter reviews the respective sequence analysis literature. I conclude that sequence analysis is most promising in further advancing insights on family formation when applied in rigorous research designs that incorporate the broader premises of the life course paradigm and narrative positivism. To illustrate the argument, I present a study on the de-standardization of family formation before and after the German Reunification. This case study explores constellations of macro structural context factors (multiple-way interactions) to theorize the de-standardization of family formation and proposes a new method for establishing within and between group differences in sequences.
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- 1.
Narrative is understood in a generic sense as a process or story (Abbott 1992, p. 428) and does not involve complexity of meaning that is inherently unformalizable as in qualitative research. It instead refers to a processual, action-based approach to social reality and formalization should be used to the extent that it advances sociological insight.
- 2.
- 3.
Cross-level interactions, often of primary theoretical interest, add another layer of complexity.
- 4.
Han and Moen (1999) were the first to calculate separate distance matrices for each dimension and the adding them up in an application on retirement.
- 5.
Employment patterns have greatly changed as well but much of this change is expressed in different qualitative patterns, such as a higher prevalence of part-time work in some countries and not in an increase in the quantity of variability across the life course.
- 6.
There was also broad support for unwed mothers that favored access to housing and parental leave, which set incentives for premarital births and a delay of marriage for the one-year period of these provisions (Huinink et al. 1995).
- 7.
Note that hypotheses 1 and 2 imply stable standardization of family formation across all of Germany as a compositional outcome of a more sizeable de-standardization in the smaller East German population and moderate re-standardization in the larger West German population.
- 8.
The East German sample of the cohort born 1971 includes women who were born in the GDR and living in East Germany in 1990.
- 9.
There were few deviations and in most cases there was only a few months difference in the timing of a change in partnership status.
- 10.
Divorced and widowed are combined, because widowhood occurs very rarely in this relatively young sample.
- 11.
For Lesnard’s dynamic Hamming distance, substitution costs depend on time point specific transition rates between family formation states, which can vary across bootstrap samples. As a result, the absolute transition costs can vary across bootstrap samples, but the principle of deriving them always remains the same.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Felix Bühlmann, Marcel Raab, and Frans Willekens for detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. This chapter benefited from previous collaboration on sequence analysis and countless fruitful discussions with Silke Aisenbrey and Tim F Liao. The arguments and empirical study in this chapter were greatly influenced by the guidance of two exceptional mentors: Hannah Brückner and Karl Ulrich Mayer. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research that provided a wonderful academic environment for a research visit, during which most of this chapter was written. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Fasang, A. (2014). New Perspectives on Family Formation: What Can We Learn from Sequence Analysis?. In: Blanchard, P., Bühlmann, F., Gauthier, JA. (eds) Advances in Sequence Analysis: Theory, Method, Applications. Life Course Research and Social Policies, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04969-4_6
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