Measuring the Agreement between Sequences
- 1 November 1995
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Sociological Methods & Research
- Vol. 24 (2) , 214-231
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124195024002004
Abstract
The present article proposes a new method to assess distances between sequences of states, belonging to, for instance, event histories. It is based on the number of moves needed to turn one sequence into another sequence. This number of moves is standardized by relating it to the number of moves needed to turn the sequence into its reverse. Weighting it in different manners by the number of common elements in both sequences yields three different agreement measures, suited for different kinds of research questions. Life history data from 494 young adults show that applying our agreement measure to these data can yield insight in interesting relationships, otherwise not readily obtained.Keywords
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