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The authors review all known studies applying optimal matching or alignment (OM) techniques to social science sequence data. Issues of data, coding, temporality, cost setting/algorithm design, and analytic strategies are considered, and substantive findings are reviewed. The authors conclude that OM techniques have produced interesting results in a wide variety of areas, the most promising being studies of careers and of sequentially organized cultural artifacts.
Abbott et al. (Tue,) studied this question.