Before the 90s, men's employment careers in East and West Germany were quite similar, despite their widely differing institutional settings. Before reunification, employment biographies were mainly dominated by full-time employment in both East and West. After 1989 the GDR was incorporated into...

We describe a general strategy to analyze sequence data and introduce SQ-Ados, a bundle of Stata programs implementing the proposed strategy. The programs include several tools for describing and visualizing sequences as well as a Mata library to perform optimal matching using the Needleman –...

In the early half of the twentieth century in West Germany the male breadwinner model was dominant with men playing the provider role and women staying at home and taking care of children. The employment of mothers was not a common practice, so that they only worked due to the financial...

Considering demographic life courses as sequences, non recurrent and recurrent sequences are distinguished from each other. The description of life courses in terms of sequences leads to distinguish atomistic from holistic and static from dynamic approaches. Optimal matching and a monothetic...

One major methodological problem in analysis of sequence data is the determination of costs from which distances between sequences are derived. Although this problem is currently not optimally dealt with in the social sciences, it has some similarity with problems that have been solved in...

The optimal matching (OM) algorithm is widely used for sequence analysis in sociology. It has a natural interpretation for discrete-time sequences but is also widely used for life-history data, which are continuous in time. Life-history data are arguably better dealt with in terms of episodes...

Moving and travelling extensively for job reasons is often seen as a way to achieve a successful career. Yet, evidence based on longitudinal data is limited. In this paper, we use a sequence analysis to study typical histories of intensive forms of work-related spatial mobility, i.e. migration,...

We consider the problem of the visualization of life courses represented as sequences. We describe the state of the art and introduce new plots which improve the graphical display of sequences unveiling their most salient features. Our proposal is based upon the application of smoothing...

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...

This paper uses sequence methods and cluster analysis to create a typology of career paths for a cohort of British 29 year olds born in 1970. There are clear ‘types’ identified by these techniques including several paths dominated by various forms of non-employment. These types are...