In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Dennis Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>the basic idea is to be able to "explain" the post score variance in terms 
>of something ELSE ... that is, for example ... we know that some of the 
>variance in pain is due to one's TOLERANCE for PAIN ... thus, if we can 
>remove the part of pain variance that is due to TOLERANCE FOR pain ... then 
>the leftover variance on pain is a purer measure in its own right ..
>
>if you do as suggested ... remove the pre from the post ... say pre pain 
>from post pain ... what is left over? it is not pain anymore but rather, 
>some OTHER variable ... which is not what the purpose of the study was ... 
>to investigate (i assume anyway)

Well, the idea is that the OTHER variable is the treatment effect,
whose quantification presumably IS the purpose of the study.  I think
this is a pretty standard thing to do.

It seems that the original question was meant to address the more
technical issue of whether you can include the pre-treatment value as
an explanatory variable when the response variable is already the
CHANGE from before treatment to after treatment.  As another poster
has ably explained, you can, though it's a bit strange and redundant.

   Radford

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Radford M. Neal                                       [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Toronto                     http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford
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