What Does Explain the Heterogeneity in Early Family Trajectories? A Non-Parametric Approach for Sequence Analysis

Nicola Barban, University of Padua

This study examines the impact of demographic and socio-economic variables on the variability of family-life trajectories during young adulthood. We define life-courses as sequences on a monthly time scale and we apply optimal matching (OM) to compute dissimilarities between individuals. We propose a generalization of analysis of variance (ANOVA) to evaluate the link between non-metric measures (sequence dissimilarities) with categorical variables. We conduct hypothesis test using a permutation approach. Data come from the first and third wave of The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The sample is restricted to women from age 18 to 24.