Fitting Event-History Models to Uneventful Data

Data with which to study disability dynamics usually take the form of successive current-status measures of disability rather than a record of events or spell durations. One recent paper presented a semi-Markov model of disability dynamics in which spell durations were inferred from sequences of current-status measures taken at 12-month intervals. In that analysis, it was assumed that no unobserved disablement transitions occurred between annual interviews. We use data from a longitudinal survey in which participants’ disability was measured at monthly intervals, and simulate the survival curves for remaining disabled that would be obtained with 1- and 12-month follow-up intervals. The median length of an episode of disability based on the 12-month interval data is over 22 months, while the “true” median, based on the 1-month interval data, is only one month.