Analyzing marital trajectories through optimal matching

Sequence analysis, which allows studying life courses as meaningful units, has been increasingly used in both sociology and demography in recent years. Nonetheless, it has been exploited mainly as a descriptive tool for employment histories and, to a smaller extent, childberaring and residential mobility. In these applications, the challenge to compare and classify sequences for explanatory purposes has largely been bypassed by imposing a static perspective on sequence data and by focusing on how a set of individuals is distributed among states. This choice, in part, is due to the fact that in the social sciences there is little agreement about how we can compare sequences and “cluster” them through the tools of optimal matching (OM). In this paper, we expand the approach of Billari and Piccarreta (2005) to recurrent events for studying marital trajectories in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.