Survival Analysis

Survival analysis is a collection of statistical methods used to address questions that have to do with whether and when an event of interest takes place. It is “the analysis of data that correspond to the time from a well-defined time origin until the occurrence of some particular event or end-point” (Collett, 1994, p. 1). Time-to-event data are ubiquitous in research of life-span human development. For instance, in evaluating mental health treatment interventions, researchers closely monitor the timing of relapse of targeted problems because reducing the incidences and determining the timing of relapse are key measures of intervention effectiveness. This entry describes key concepts and methods of survival analysis.

The term survival analysis comes from biomedical research because the methods originated from biomedical interests in studying ...