Matthias Studer, University of Geneva - Selecting Qualitative Cases using Sequences Analysis

Title:  Selecting Qualitative Cases using Sequences Analysis: A mixed method for in-depth understanding of life course trajectories

Abstract: Many social research questions involve understanding how key characteristics, such as gender or disadvantaged backgrounds, shape the unfolding of life-course trajectories. Similarly, other researchers aim to understand how previous professional, criminal, or family trajectories lead to a subsequent outcome. In this presentation, we present an innovative methodological framework combining quantitative and qualitative inquiry to gain a deeper and nuanced understanding of these relationships. The method relies on two complementary statistical indicators that label qualitative cases according to their typicality and their illustrativeness of a given statistical relationship. It allows for the identification of diverse kinds of observations—from representative stories to counterexamples that might reveal hidden mechanisms. Such identification can then be used to select (sample) qualitative cases for further investigation, or to situate pre-existing qualitative cases within statistical results. Demonstrated through a study of residential trajectories and childhood socialization, this framework—implemented in the TraMineRextrasR package—provides a rigorous toolkit for life-course researchers seeking to explain how and why specific longitudinal pathways unfold, ensuring that deeper qualitative findings are explicitly and statistically anchored in quantitative evidence. While developed for life-course research, the key concepts and methods can be applied in any study aiming to combine statistical analysis and qualitative inquiry.

Presenter:  Matthias Studer, University of Geneva

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