TraMineR (version 2.2-10)

seqprecstart: State precarity

Description

Determines the state undesirableness degree from the state ordering or conversely the state undesirableness values from the state ordering. (See details.)

Usage

seqprecstart(seqdata,
    state.order=alphabet(seqdata, with.missing), state.equiv=NULL,
    stprec=NULL, with.missing=FALSE)

Value

The vector of assigned undesirableness degrees sorted according to the original order of states in the alphabet.

Arguments

seqdata

a state sequence object (class stslist) as returned by the seqdef function.

state.order

Vector of short state labels defining the order of the states. First the most desirable (most positive) state and then the other states in decreasing desirability order. States of the alphabet that are not included here define the non-comparable states.

state.equiv

List of state equivalence classes. The classes in the list are each set as the vector of the short labels of the states forming the class.

stprec

Vector of user defined state undesirableness degrees ordered conformably with the alphabet of seqdata. Use negative values to indicate non-comparable states.

with.missing

Logical. Should the missing state be considered as an element of the alphabet?

Author

Gilbert Ritschard

Details

When stprec is provided, the order is determined from the stprec values and overwrites state.order.

When stprec=NULL, the initial state undesirableness degrees are set as equivalently spaced values between 0 and 1 assigned to the states in specified order by state.order.

Equivalent states get the mean value of the states in the equivalence class.

Incomparable states (those not on the state.order list and not member of an equivalent class having a state listed in state.order) receive the average of all state undesirableness degrees.

When stprec is user defined, the provided vector is normalized into a vector with minimum 0 and maximum 1 and mean value of states in a class are assigned to all class members.

Only one state per class needs to be on the state order list. If more than one member is on the state order list they should be listed consecutively. Note that currently no check is performed.

When with.missing=TRUE, use the seqdata, "nr" argument to possibly include it in the state.order or state.equiv.

References

Ritschard, G. (2023), "Measuring the nature of individual sequences", Sociological Methods and Research, 52(4), 2016-2049. tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.1177/00491241211036156").

Ritschard, G., Bussi, M., and O'Reilly, J. (2018), "An index of precarity for measuring early employment insecurity", in G. Ritschard, and M. Studer, Sequence Analysis and Related Approaches: Innovative Methods and Applications, Series Life Course Research and Social Policies, Vol. 10, pp 279-295. Cham: Springer.

See Also

seqprecarity.

Examples

## Defining a sequence object with columns 13 to 24
## in the 'actcal' example data set
data(actcal)
actcal <- actcal[1:200,] ## Here, only a subset
actcal.seq <- seqdef(actcal[,13:24])

## state precarity levels using the original state order
seqprecstart(actcal.seq)

## Assuming A and B as equivalent regarding precarity
seqprecstart(actcal.seq, state.equiv=list(c('A','B')))

## and letting C be non-comparable
seqprecstart(actcal.seq, state.order=c("A","B","D"), state.equiv=list(c('A','B')))