Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Using Sequence Analysis to Understand Youth and Family Social Program Pathways

(Family and Child Policy)

Researchers often seek to produce comprehensive profiles of populations of interest, including multiple descriptive analyses, to better understand life trajectories and service use. Sequence analysis has emerged as a way to describe more holistic pathways by analyzing timing and order of service use and life events over time. These data can then be grouped using clustering analysis to differentiate pathways among populations of interest. Descriptively, these patterns can present a set of concise profile of subpopulations. The pathways can also be used in regression analysis as either an independent or dependent variable; in other words, the trajectories can be used to predict future outcomes and researchers can also predict the trajectories based on prior histories or demographics. These types of analyses can be useful in summarizing complex administrative data to develop targeted interventions and programs.

The papers in this panel all use sequence analysis to explore pathways of different youth and family populations. The first paper uses sequence analysis to describe the service use and housing trajectories of transition-age youth who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. It combines administrative data about nine service areas to develop typologies of youth and uses data about prior service use and youth characteristics to predict these typologies. The second paper uses sequence analysis to categorize empirically defined pathways for youth who are dually involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. It describes the characteristics of different pathways, as well as differential young adult outcomes for these pathways, and compares these results to theory-based pathways. The third paper uses sequence analysis to measure housing stability among homeless families in a supportive housing program and those who are not in the program. It then accounted for baseline differences between these two groups and assessed impacts of the program on housing stability and preventable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. All papers will include recommendations for using this methodology in other settings and research, as well as recommendations for translating findings from this methodology into policy and practice.