Association between survival time and ordinal covariates

An application of the method of rank correlation is proposed for testing independence between a censored survival time and an ordinal covariate. The test statistic counts the number of concordances minus the number of discordances at each time with event(s) and adds across times; it is expressible as a score statistic within the proportional hazards framework. The proposed test includes as a special case, a generalization of Jonekheere's test against ordered alternatives and as applied to the analysis of categorical data, it can be seen as a generalization of the Mantel- Haenszel procedure.