During a routine literature search a few years ago, I stumbled onto a prickly set of articles in a 2000 special issue of the journal Sociological Methods & Research. I was seeking methodological guidance for an analysis of the association between individuals' stress levels and their frequency of switching between social roles and contexts. Several of the articles seemed generally relevant to what I was trying to do, so I looked at the entire issue. As I read on, I noticed that there was a measure of antagonism among some of the issue's authors. This in itself is not unusual, as methodological debates are common in the social sciences and can lead to conflict (escalating, in some cases, to near vehicular assault in campus parking lots). Nothing so serious was going on in the case of this special issue. But the contributors were using markedly spirited terms – such as “trivial” and “silly” – to characterize each other's contributions. The subject of this particular debate was sequence analysis.

In the research that I had done to that point, I had never used the kinds of sequence analysis methods that were being discussed in that special issue – in particular, optimal matching. But I have long been fascinated by complex dynamic social processes, so the idea of learning more about how to detect general patterns in such processes appealed to me. My methodological training in graduate school focused primarily on multivariate analysis and social network techniques, and it seemed that these would not take me where I wanted to go with my new research. (I turned out to be only half wrong about that.) I broadened my literature search, and soon discovered numerous alternative approaches that are concerned with assessing the timing and order of social phenomena. They all shared a concern with sequencing. And yet, much of that work avoided the language of sequence analysis. As the pile of relevant references on the desk in my study grew taller, I became increasingly annoyed by the fact that I could not find a single source that tied all of this work together.