ABSTRACT
This book is designed to provide a conceptually oriented introduction to multiple regres sion along with more complex methods that flow naturally from multiple regression: path analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling. In this introduc tory chapter, we begin with a discussion and example of simple, or bivariate, regression. For many readers, this will be a review, but, even then, the example and computer output should provide a transition to subsequent chapters and to multiple regression. The chapter also reviews several other related concepts, and introduces several issues (prediction and expla nation, causality) that we will return to repeatedly in this book. Finally, the chapter relates regression to other approaches with which you may be more familiar, such as analysis of variance (ANOVA). I will demonstrate that ANOVA and regression are fun damentally the same process and that, in fact, regression subsumes ANOVA.
