BEMC DEC 2020 - Peter Tennant - “Resolving Lord’s Paradox & Why Change-Scores Don’t Capture Change”
Channel: Berlin Epidemiological Methods Colloquium
Date: 2020-12-07

Peter Tennant, Leeds, UK 
“Resolving Lord’s Paradox and Why Change-Scores Don’t Capture Change”
In 1967, Frederick Lord posed a statistical conundrum that has been the subject of ongoing statistical debate for over 50 years. Commonly known as Lord’s Paradox, the dilemma arises because analyses of an outcome changes-score (i.e. the follow-up minus baseline value, also known as a difference-score or change-from-baseline variable) provide different results to analyses of the follow-up adjusted for baseline in observational data. But which is right? To find out, this lecture will walk through the causal inference mirror to re-explore our understanding of ‘change’ and discover the unbelievable truth behind Lord’s conundrum.