Using Survival Analysis in Psychology

This article aims to demonstrate the usefulness of survival analysis techniques in psychological applications. To this end, two typical psychological data sets - one containing sexual milestone times, the other latencies to task completion - were analyzed using methods conventionally employed in psychological research and contrasted with survival analyses of the same data sets. In particular, Kaplan-Meier estimation of survivor curves and Cox regression are demonstrated. A brief account of the methodology for nonparametric and semiparametric survival analysis and comments about software implementations are provided as appendices.