Full Description
In the observational study of social systems, the major conceptual innovation of the last century was General Systems Theory. Yet the General Systems Theory conceptions of interacting social systems were doomed to remain at the prescientific level of metaphor until a set of statistical techniques were developed and applied. These techniques have come to be known as sequential analysis. Sequential analysis has as its first objective the detection of recurring sequential patterns in a stream of coding categories describing social interaction. These techniques can be employed to study the repertoires of individuals.
Contents
Preface; Reading this book quickly; Part I. Introduction: 1. Advertisement; 2. History; 3. The language of sequential analysis; Part II. Fitting the Timetable: 4. The order of the Markov chain; 5. Stationarity of the Markov chain; 6. Homogeneity; 7. Everyday computations of stationarity, order and homogeneity; 8. Sampling distributions; 9. Lag sequential analysis; Part III. The Timetable and the Contextual Design: 10. Log-linear models; 11. Log-linear models: review and examples; 12. A single case analysis of the timetable; 13. Logit models and logistic regression; 14. The problem of autocontingency and its solutions; 15. Recent advances: a brief overview; 16. A brief summary; References; Index.
