Life-Course Perspective on Personality Traits and Fertility with Sequence Analysis
利用德国社会经济面板数据，通过多通道序列分析将20-40岁个体的生育、婚姻和职业轨迹聚类，研究人格特质如何影响这些生命历程路径，并开发了处理截断轨迹的方法以纳入年轻群体。
Abstract We investigate the link between personality traits (PTs) and fertility, accounting for the possible interplay with other key life course events. Using data from German Socio-Economic Panel survey, we build sequence-type representations of fertility, union and job careers between the ages of 20 and 40. We rely on multichannel sequence analysis (MSA) and on the Partitioning around Medoids algorithm to cluster individuals with similar experiences, and relate clusters to PTs via multinomial regression. We also develop a procedure to apply standard and MSA to truncated trajectories. This enables inclusion of individuals whose trajectories were otherwise observed for a limited age span, notably belonging to younger cohorts. We show that PTs relate to these (portions of) life-course trajectories, of which fertility is only one outcome.