This book by Frans Willekens presents a step-by-step procedure for investigating life histories using descriptive methods and statistical modeling, as well as the popular software language for statistical computing (R). It also provides an introduction to multistate event history analysis. It is an extension of survival analysis, in which a single terminal event (endpoint) is considered and the time-to-event is studied. Multistate models focus on life histories or trajectories, conceptualized as sequences of states and sequences of transitions between states. Life histories are modeled as realizations of continuous-time Markov processes.