Event History Analysis with Two Time Scales. An Application to Transitions from Cohabitation to Marriage or Separation

Angela Carollo , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Hein Putter, Leiden University Medical Center
Paul Eilers, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam
Jutta Gampe , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Event history models are based on transition rates and to define such hazards of experi- encing an event the time scale over which the process evolves needs to be identified. In many applications, however, more than one time scale might be of importance. Traditional approaches choose one time scale as the dominant one and model the other time scale as a, possibly time-varying, covariate. Here we demonstrate how to model a hazard jointly over two time dimensions. The model assumes a smooth bivariate hazard function, and the function is estimated by two-dimensional P -splines. We model transitions from cohabitation to marriage or separation simultaneously over the age of the individual and the duration of the cohabitation. We use data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) and demonstrate that considering the two time scales jointly provides additional insights about the transition from cohabitation to marriage or separation.

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 Presented in Session 48. Data and Methods