i am stucked in silly but causative task. If one woman has 1st child, but she did not have second child. When calculating the birth interval for the second child, what would be placed in the case of that woman's birth interval for the second child? I want to apply Cox proportional hazard model. As there is censored information. Now how do I calculate censoring information? Do I consider the date of the first child born to the end of the survey period?
Or in the case of the second child interval, do we consider only those women who have a second child?
In the Cox proportional hazard model, censoring occurs when the event of interest (in your case, the birth of the second child) has not occurred for some individuals within the study period. In your situation, the women who have not had a second child by the end of the study period would be considered censored.
To calculate the censoring information for the birth interval of the second child, you would consider the time from the birth of the first child to either the birth of the second child (if it occurs within the study period) or the end of the study period (if the second child has not been born).
For women who have a second child within the study period, you would have the complete birth interval data. However, for women who do not have a second child within the study period, the birth interval would be right-censored at the end of the study period. This means that their birth interval for the second child is unknown beyond the study period.
In your analysis using the Cox proportional hazard model, you would include both complete birth intervals (for women who had a second child within the study period) and right-censored birth intervals (for women who did not have a second child within the study period). The model takes into account the censoring information and estimates the hazard ratio, which represents the relative risk of experiencing the event (birth of the second child) at any given time.
It's important to ensure that your data collection and study design adequately capture the information on the birth intervals and censoring status for each woman. This will allow you to properly analyze and interpret the results using the Cox proportional hazard model.
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