Compare methods

	Sequence Analysis	Optimal Matching Analysis
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1980s–2000 (sociological consolidation)	1970 (algorithm); 1980s (sociology)
Originator	Andrew Abbott (introduced to sociology)	Needleman & Wunsch (algorithm); Andrew Abbott (sociological use)
Type	Holistic analysis of categorical state sequences over time	Edit-distance dissimilarity between categorical sequences
Seminal source	Abbott, A., & Tsay, A. (2000). Sequence analysis and optimal matching methods in sociology: review and prospect. Sociological Methods & Research, 29(1), 3–33.	Abbott, A., & Tsay, A. (2000). Sequence analysis and optimal matching methods in sociology: review and prospect. Sociological Methods & Research, 29(1), 3–33.
Aliases	social sequence analysis, life-course sequence analysis, categorical sequence analysis, trajectory analysis	optimal matching, OMA, edit-distance sequence comparison, Levenshtein sequence distance
Related	5	5
Summary	Sequence analysis is a holistic method for studying ordered categorical trajectories — such as month-by-month employment states, family life-course events, or daily activity patterns — by treating each individual's whole sequence as a unit, measuring how dissimilar pairs of sequences are, and grouping them into a typology of characteristic pathways. Introduced to sociology by Andrew Abbott, it shifts attention from isolated transitions to the shape of entire life courses.	Optimal matching analysis measures how dissimilar two categorical sequences are by computing the minimum total cost of editing one sequence into the other through substitution and insertion/deletion operations. Borrowed from computer science and molecular biology and introduced to sociology by Andrew Abbott, it supplies the pairwise distances that underpin sequence analysis of careers, family histories, and other life-course trajectories.