Piccarreta Raffaella, Studer Matthias
Department of Decision Sciences, Bocconi University, via Rontgen 1, Milan, Italy.
Geneva School of Social Sciences; NCCR LIVES-Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives, University of Geneva, Bd du Pont-d'Arve 28, CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland.
Adv Life Course Res. 2019 Sep;41:100251. doi: 10.1016/j.alcr.2018.10.004. Epub 2018 Oct 22.
We survey state-of-the-art approaches to study trajectories in their entirety, adopting a holistic perspective, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We begin by considering sequence analysis (SA), one of the most established holistic approaches. We discuss the inherent problems arising in SA, particularly in the study of the relationship between trajectories and covariates. We describe some recent developments combining SA and Event History Analysis, and illustrate how weakening the holistic perspective-focusing on sub-trajectories-might result in a more flexible analysis of life courses. We then move to some model-based approaches (included in the broad classes of multistate and of mixture latent Markov models) that further weaken the holistic perspective, assuming that the difficult task of predicting and explaining trajectories can be simplified by focusing on the collection of observed transitions. Our goal is twofold. On one hand, we aim to provide social scientists with indications for informed methodological choices and to emphasize issues that require consideration for proper application of the described approaches. On the other hand, by identifying relevant and open methodological challenges, we highlight and encourage promising directions for future research.
我们从整体角度审视研究轨迹的最新方法，并讨论其优缺点。我们首先考虑序列分析（SA），这是最成熟的整体方法之一。我们讨论SA中出现的固有问题，特别是在研究轨迹与协变量之间的关系时。我们描述了一些将SA与事件史分析相结合的最新进展，并说明弱化整体视角——关注子轨迹——如何能带来对生命历程更灵活的分析。然后我们转向一些基于模型的方法（包括多状态和混合潜在马尔可夫模型的广泛类别），这些方法进一步弱化了整体视角，假设通过关注观察到的转变的收集，可以简化预测和解释轨迹这一艰巨任务。我们的目标有两个。一方面，我们旨在为社会科学家提供明智的方法选择建议，并强调正确应用所述方法需要考虑的问题。另一方面，通过识别相关且开放的方法挑战，我们突出并鼓励未来研究的有前景的方向。
