I'm looking for a reference the will provide some discussion of the theoretical implications of the following problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My graduate student and I are looking at the determinants of population growth rates (pgr) for aphids feeding on plants in different conditions. The pgr is estimated by caging an individual aphid onto a plant and following that aphid from birth until death recording the development time and number of offspring reproduced. Occasionally an aphid will die before reproducing. The problem we are struggling with is whether that should be a missing value or a 0 in the analysis. We'd like some references on the philosophical views of this problem (0 vs missing value). Thanks in advance. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dr Jonathan Newman Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS [EMAIL PROTECTED] . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
