Why do sequences matter?

Up until now, psychology has had its greatest successes with problems that lend themselves to experimentation, quantitative surveys or computational modelling, where there are numerous equivalent cases, with precise and complete data, and ample time for analysis. But there are other kinds of problems which are common and very important, yet notoriously intractable by these means, problems in the real world, where orderly situations unravel over time and have to be repaired. These situations are too intricately structured for standard experiments, and too poorly understood for attitude surveys. They are 'chain reactions', with no standard initial conditions, or clearly separable causes and effects.

Such problems call for a radically new approach, which starts with the kind of information that is available in practice (often incomplete, idiosyncratic, fragmented, partly qualitative, and rapidly changing) and works out increasingly effective ways of dealing with it on its own terms. The methods may sometimes have to work even with single-cases and in real time. Better tools are essential to extract the relevant patterns from data, to extrapolate them into the future, and to steer them away from bad outcomes. If we could understand how the present generates the future, we should have the key to conflicts, accidents, the breakdown of relationships, and crises of all kinds.

Science is not just 'the art of the possible', but the art of making things possible.

. . . and if you are still not convinced . . .

Read the following text. It is just the same as the one above - the same words, the same number of occurrences of each word, the same capitalisation and punctuation. Everything has been preserved - except the sequence. And of course, it is meaningless. This is what our normal psychological representations, our typical data, do to human action and experience. They take a meaningful series of events, which is meaningful largely because of the order in which things occur, and turn it into something meaningless, in which everything except the order has been faithfully captured. That is why Behavioural Sequence Analysis is such an important (though largely unknown) approach to research!

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Sequence analysis starts by 'coding' records of behaviour to form something like this

and then creates a behavioural 'flow map' that looks like this*.

* Residents' expectations of behaviour during a domestic fire, from the work of PhD student Glyn Lawson.