
Matthias StuderUniversity of Geneva | UNIGE · National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives
Matthias Studer
PhD in Socioeconomics
About
82
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor of quantitative methods for social sciences at the LIVES center and Institute of Demography and Socioeconomics of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Geneva. My research interests include quantitative methods for longitudinal data analysis, sequence analysis, gendered career inequalities, labor market and social policy evaluation.
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - August 2015
January 2013 - August 2014
March 2007 - March 2011
Education
March 2007 - June 2012
Publications
Publications (82)
The life course paradigm emphasizes the need to study not only the situation at a given point in time, but also its evolution over the life course in the medium and long term. These trajectories are often represented by categorical data. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of the multiple imputation methods proposed so far in the co...
Background
In standard Sequence Analysis, similar trajectories are clustered together to create a typology of trajectories, which is then often used to evaluate the association between sequence patterns and covariates inside regression models. The sampling uncertainty, which affects both the derivation of the typology and the associated regressions...
Background
In standard Sequence Analysis, similar trajectories are clustered together to create a typology of trajectories, which is then often used to evaluate the association between sequence patterns and covariates inside regression models. The sampling uncertainty, which affects both the derivation of the typology and the associated regressions...
Historically, family planning (FP) programs in low-income countries (LICs) have been valued for their benefits to child and maternal health. Today, there is a focus on integrating contraceptive access into women’s rights. However, measuring the impact of FP on women’s economic empowerment remains challenging due to a lack of comprehensive longitudi...
Working life is associated with lifestyle, screening uptake, and occupational health risks that may explain differences in cancer onset. To better understand the association between working life and cancer risk, we need to account for the entire employment history. We investigated whether lifetime employment trajectories are associated with cancer...
Working life is associated with lifestyle, screening uptake, and occupational health risks that may explain differences in cancer onset. To better understand the association between working life and cancer risk, we need to account for the entire employment history. We investigated whether lifetime employment trajectories are associated with cancer...
Sequence analysis is a data mining technique that is increasingly gaining ground in learning analytics. Sequence analysis enables researchers to extract meaningful insights from sequential data, i.e., to summarize the sequential patterns of learning data and classify those patterns into homogeneous groups. In this chapter, readers will become famil...
How does plant closure affect the employment and well-being of displaced workers? This article presents the results of two surveys of workers at five manufacturing plants two and 11 years after mass layoffs. After two years, two-thirds of displaced workers had been re-employed, one in five workers was still unemployed, and one in 10 workers had ret...
This article compares two methods to study the link between educational pathways and income. Sequence analysis provides a holistic view but might fail to identify key trajectory characteristics. A new validation method overcoming this limit is proposed. Feature extraction and selection can directly identify these key characteristics. The conclusion...
This paper provides a descriptive and visual analysis of labour market trajectories in South Africa and Indonesia. Using a sequence analysis of individual labour market trajectories, we illustrate the presence or absence of new labour market trends in the two countries. The analysis highlights differences across cohorts, by educational background,...
The life-course paradigm insists on the need to study trajectories and how they unfold over time. Two broad families of methodological strategies are generally used for this purpose. The first strategy focuses on the occurrence of events or transitions describing the dynamics of life trajectories. The second strategy emphasizes the holistic nature...
Previous work has found that later life urban–rural differences in cognitive health can be largely explained by indicators of cognitive reserve such as education or occupation. However, previous research concentrated on residence in limited, specific, periods. This study offers a detailed investigation on the association between urban (vs. rural) r...
Objectives
Previous studies have shown the importance of individual markers of cognitive reserve, such as education and occupation, for cognitive health in old age. However, there has been only little investigation so far on how this relationship varies across contexts.
Methods
We analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in E...
This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions.
The application of SA in the social sci...
The study of labour market transitions is an important aspect not only for researchers but also for policy makers. Such transitions, including retirement, extended working life, unemployment or school-to-work transitions etc., can be challenging and are often identified as turning points in the (re)production and accumulation of social inequalities...
Collection of ancillary functions and utilities to be used in conjunction with the 'TraMineR' package for sequence data exploration. Includes, among others, specific functions such as state survival plots, position-wise group-typical states, dynamic sequence indicators, and dissimilarities between event sequences. Also includes contributions by non...
In this article, the author proposes a methodology for the validation of sequence analysis typologies on the basis of parametric bootstraps following the framework proposed by Hennig and Lin (2015). The method works by comparing the cluster quality of an observed typology with the quality obtained by clustering similar but nonclustered data. The au...
Several studies have investigated the link between a previous trajectory and a given later-life outcome. Trajectories are complex objects. Identifying which aspects of the trajectories are relevant is of primary interest in terms both of prediction and testing specific theories. In this work, we propose an innovative approach based on data mining f...
Cet article étudie les inégalités hommes/femmes pendant la transition du Master à la carrière académique en Suisse. Adoptant une perspective comparative, il se centre sur la variation des inégalités entre les disciplines et les met en lien avec les variations dans les perspectives de carrières en dehors du monde académique. Il en ressort que les in...
The aim of the paper is to describe individual trajectories of vulnerability to unemployment in the medium term during the Great Recession in relation to individual characteristics using longitudinal panel data. Individual-level data allows us to take into account both within- and between-individual differences in the evolution of vulnerability to...
In this article, we propose an innovative method which is a combination of Sequences Analysis and Event History Analysis. We called this method Sequence History Analysis (SHA). We start by identifying typical past trajectories of individuals over time by using Sequence Analysis. We then estimate the effect of these typical past trajectories on the...
This introductory chapter briefly describes the development of sequence analysis in social sciences from the pioneering contributions made by Andrew Abbott to date. We then discuss the future of sequence analysis, which, from our point of view, calls for a tighter interaction with other methods for longitudinal data. Lastly, we show how the papers...
This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions proposed i...
This paper discusses the usefulness of divisive property-based and fuzzy clustering for sequence analysis. Divisive property-based clustering provides well-defined clustering membership rules. Aside from significantly simplifying interpretations of clustering, it is also useful when one plans to use the same typology in other samples or studies. We...
In this article, we propose an innovative method which is a combination of Sequences Analysis and Event History Analysis. We called this method Sequence History Analysis (SHA). We start by identifying typical past trajectories of individuals over time by using Sequence Analysis. We then estimate the effect of these typical past trajectories on the...
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 bet...
Open Access Article available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2018.02.003
Over the past 50 years, family formation trajectories have undergone major changes in the events that occur as well as in the timing and order of these events. Whereas previous studies showed when and how these shifts occur, not much research has been conducted to test...
The relationship between processes and time-varying covariates is of central theoretical interest in addressing many social science research questions. On the one hand, event history analysis (EHA) has been the chosen method to study these kinds of relationships when the outcomes can be meaningfully specified as simple instantaneous events or trans...
The progression of occupational careers can be conceptualized as a path dependent process where former decisions narrow the range of occupational alternatives. Positive feedback and mastery experiences, which individuals experience when working in their occupation, function as reinforcing mechanisms. In addition, the impending losses of human capit...
”Position wise group-typical states” aims at looking at the relationship between a state sequences and a covariate (Studer, 2015). The aims of this brief introduction is to show how it can be interpreted and ran with R (package TraMineRextras) using a short example: how the school-to-work trajectories in Northern Ireland are linked to the qualifica...
Full text and papers available here: https://lacosa.lives-nccr.ch/online-proceedings
The aim of this study is to examine whether the co-residence structures in which young adults grew up is likely to affect their propensity of leaving the parental home. The empirical research was based on the LIVES Cohort study, a panel survey that started in autumn 2013 in Switzerland. Two longitudinal statistical methods were used as complementar...
Fulltext (open access): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12125/abstract
https://goo.gl/31sWpD
This is a comparative study of the multiple ways of measuring dissimilarities between state sequences. The originality of the study is the focus put on the differences between sequences that are sociologically important when studying life...
p>We explore the relations between the notion of distance and a feature set based concept of similarity and show that this concept of similarity has a spatial interpretation that is complementary to distance: it is interpreted as “direction”. Furthermore, we show how proper normalization leads to distances that can be directly interpreted as dissim...
In this comment, I discuss the usefulness of three different strategies to analyze the relationships between sequences in different domains: namely GIMSA (Global Interdependence Multiple Sequence Analysis), MCSA (multichannel sequence analysis) and FS, the so-called “fourth” strategy (clustering sequences separately and analyzing their relationship...
Volet quantitatif de l'évaluation de la politique de réinsertion professionnelle des chômeurs en fin de droits. Mandat confié à l’Institut d’études démographiques et du parcours de vie par la Cour des comptes de la République et canton de Genève
http://www.cdc-ge.ch/fr/Publications/Rapports-d-audit-et-d-evaluation.html
p>The aim of this article is to investigate the factors underlying old-age poverty, with particular emphasis on its construction along the life course. We focus on the question whether the inclusion of life course information could explain social and gender differences in old-age poverty in Switzerland. Our results suggest that poverty in old-age p...
Because optimal matching (OM) distance is not very sensitive to differences in the order of states, we introduce a subsequence-based distance measure that can be adapted to subsequence length, to subsequence duration, and to soft-matching of states. Using a simulation technique developed by Studer, we investigate the sensitivity, relative to OM, of...
p>This package is a toolbox for sequence manipulation, description, rendering and more generally the mining of sequence data in the field of social sciences. Though it is primarily intended for analyzing state or event sequences that describe life courses such as family formation histories or professional careers its features also apply to many oth...
L'analyse statistique implicative (ASI) est une méthode d'analyse de données non symétrique, conçue par Régis Gras il y a plus de trente ans. A travers thèses, articles de revues, livres et colloques, elle a été développée et l’est encore par lui, par des doctorants ou avec la collaboration d'équipes de recherche universitaires en France et à l'étr...
This manual has a twofold aim: to present the WeightedCluster library and offer a step-by-step guide to creating typologies of sequences for the social sciences. In particular, this library makes it possible to represent graphically the results of a hierarchical cluster analysis, to group identical sequences in order to analyse a larger number of s...
This chapter explains how data-mining-based techniques can be
used for discovering interesting knowledge from sequences of life events,
that is, to find out how people sequence important life events. We
illustrate with data from the biographical survey conducted by the
Swiss Household Panel in 2002. The focus is on the sequencing of
events in the o...
In this article, the authors define a methodological framework for analyzing the relationship between state sequences and covariates. Inspired by the principles of analysis of variance, this approach looks at how the covariates explain the discrepancy of the sequences. The authors use the pairwise dissimilarities between sequences to determine the...
This article describes the many capabilities offered by the TraMineR toolbox for categorical sequence data. It focuses more specifically on the analysis and rendering of state sequences. Addressed features include the description of sets of sequences by means of transversal aggregated views, the computation of longitudinal characteristics of indivi...
This is a User's Guide of the R package TraMineR version 1.8.
This paper is concerned with the summarization of a set of categorical sequences. More specifically, the problem studied is
the determination of the smallest possible number of representative sequences that ensure a given coverage of the whole set,
i.e. that have together a given percentage of sequences in their neighbourhood. The proposed heuristi...
This paper is concerned with the summarization of a set of categorical sequences. More specifically, the problem studied is the determination of the smallest possible number of representative sequences that ensure a given coverage of the whole set, i.e. that have together a given percentage of sequences in their neighbourhood. The proposed heuristi...
La recherche de liens entre objets fréquents a été popularisée par les
méthodes d’extraction de règles d’association. Dans le cas de séquences d’événements, les méthodes de fouille permettent d’extraire des sous-séquences qui peuvent ensuite être exprimées sous la forme de règles d’association séquentielle entre événements. Cette utilisation de la...
Cet article présente un ensemble d’outils destiné à analyser des séquences d’événements en sciences sociales et à visualiser les résultats obtenus. Nous commençons par formaliser la notion de séquence d’événements avant de définir une mesure de dissimilarité entre ces séquences afin de construire des typologies et de tester les liens entre ces séqu...
In this article we consider objects for which we have a matrix of dissimilarities and we are interested in their links with
covariates. We focus on state sequences for which pairwise dissimilarities are given for instance by edit distances. The methods
discussed apply however to any kind of objects and measures of dissimilarities. We start with a g...
Presentation made at the Swiss Statistical Meeting 2009.
Highlighting results about Swiss occupational trajectories (differences between women and men, evolution across birth cohorts, ...) using data from the 2002 retrospective survey carried on by the Swiss Household Panel.
This chapter is concerned with the organization of categorical sequence data. We first build a typology of sequences distinguishing
for example between chronological sequences and sequences without time content. This permits to identify the kind of information
that the data organization should preserve. Focusing then mainly on chronological sequenc...
rizing sets of sequences, Visualization. Abstract: This paper is concerned with the summarization of a set of categorical sequence data. More specif- ically, the problem studied is the determination of the smallest possible number of representative sequences that ensure a given coverage of the whole set, i.e. that have together a given percentage o...
This paper is concerned with the summarization of a set of categorical sequence data. More specifically, the problem studied is the determination of the smallest possible number of representative sequences that ensure a given coverage of the whole set, i.e. that have together a given percentage of sequences in their neighborhood. The goal is to yie...
This article presents some of the facilities offered by our TraMineR R-package for clustering and visualizing sequence data.
Firstly, we discuss our implementation of the optimal matching algorithm for evaluating the distance between two sequences
and its use for generating a distance matrix for the whole sequence data set. Once such a matrix is ob...
We explore how recent data-mining-based tools developed in domains such as biomedicine or text-mining for extracting interesting knowledge from sequence data could be applied to personal life course data. We focus on two types of approaches: \Survival" trees that at- tempt to partition the data into homogeneous groups regarding their survival chara...
This paper deals with the automatic retrieval of issues reported in legal texts and presents an experience with expert’s reports
on the application of ILO Conventions. The aim is to provide the end user, i.e. the legal expert, with a set of rules that
permits her/him to find among a predefined list of issues those addressed by any new text. Since t...
Ce travail analyse les parcours de vie familiale en les considérant comme des séquences.
Le but est de parvenir à observer le caractère temporel des parcours de vie en prenant en
compte la durée entre chaque événement constitutif de ce parcours, mais aussi l’ordre dans
lequel ils surviennent. Nous proposons d’appliquer aux données de l’enquête biog...
FLOSS communities are often described as meritocracies. We consider merit as a social construction that structures the community as a whole by allocating prestige to its participants on the basis of what they do. It implies a hierarchy of the different activities (web maintenance, writing code, bug report...) within the project. We present a study...
This paper is mainly methodological. It is concerned with the different ways me may analyse personal life course data. Personal life courses are defined by a succession of events regarding living arrangement, familial life, education, professional career, health, etc. We may focus on one of these events-leaving home, marriage, first job, divorce, b...
This paper explains how text mining was used within the context of a research project on social dialogue regimes, jointly undertaken by the University of Geneva, the University of Lyon 2 and the International Institute of Labour Studies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The research project, which was made possible through the generou...