This paper discusses the problem of extracting kinetic information on a complex process comprising consecutive reactions from thermal analysis (TA) data. As the real rates of the single reactions forming the process are not available from the TA data, information on the process mechanism can be obtained by analysing the dependence of the effective activation energy E on the conversion w. Using model DSC data, different cases of the process were considered and the corresponding E-w dependences were found. It is shown that the shape of the E-w dependence reflects adequately the kinetic regularities of the process being investigated. The activation energy of the component reactions can be estimated from the effective activation energy of the process.