Censorship

Censorship in survival-time (time-to-event, failure-time) studies refers to incomplete data.

Examples of incomplete data are:

individual still alive (no event) at end of study
individual lost to follow up or left study before the end
event not recorded properly

...in these situations the lack of completeness of data exists at the end of the study, a situation more strictly known as right censorship. Censorship in StatsDirect is used to mean right censorship.

Coding for censorship in StatsDirect is:

0 for censored data (no event observed)
≥1 for uncensored data (e.g. 1 for an individual event/death at a time point, 2 for 2 events etc. - note that 2 events can be expressed either in a single row with 2 in the censorship column or in two rows with 1 in the censorship column)

If there are problems with your data at the start of a study (e.g. start time not recorded properly) then the data are left censored. Left censored data are best avoided or dealt with by specialist Statisticians.