R help - Aug 2010 - interpretation of summary.lm() for ANOVA and ANCOVA when dealing with 2 or more factors

Hi,

I am having a hard time getting what the summary.lm-output for an ANOVA / ANCOVA
means.
Examples I find always seem to deal with simpler cases than what I meet in my
data.

My main problem is understanding the output when getting significant INTERACTION
TERMS (what never occurs in examples :().

The following is the output after summary.lm(ancova) where "week" is
continuous, "refug" is a 2-level (y,n) factor and "behand"
is a 3-level (high,low,mix) factor.


<Call:
<lm(formula = length ~ week * refug * behand)
<
<Residuals:
<     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max
<-3.91693 -0.53805 -0.01267  0.52403  4.04333
<
<Coefficients:
<                                                       Estimate Std. Error t
value Pr(>|t|)
<(Intercept)                                  6.94611    0.07175  96.811 
< 2e-16 ***
<week                                             0.77637    0.03894  19.938 
< 2e-16 ***
<refugy                                           0.15265    0.09633   1.585 
0.1132
<behandlow                                 0.31196    0.12404   2.515  
0.0120 *
<behandmix                                 0.28687    0.12467   2.301  
0.0215 *
<week:refugy                              0.30540    0.05312   5.749 1.04e-08
***
<week:behandlow                     0.31952    0.06899   4.632 3.86e-06 ***
<week:behandmix                     0.16138    0.06717   2.403   0.0164 *
<refugy:behandlow                   -0.27929    0.16623  -1.680   0.0931 .
<refugy:behandmix                   -0.17837    0.17393  -1.026   0.3052
<week:refugy:behandlow      -0.51495    0.09173  -5.614 2.26e-08 ***
<week:refugy:behandmix      -0.40225    0.09470  -4.248 2.26e-05 ***
<---
<Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05
'.' 0.1 ' ' 1

<Residual standard error: 0.9312 on 1978 degrees of freedom
< (2 observations deleted due to missingness)
<Multiple R-squared: 0.5722,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.5698
<F-statistic: 240.5 on 11 and 1978 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

In my understanding I get so far:
                             Where there are only factor levels only the
intercept is affected and where my continuous variable is involved the slope is
affected.
                             What I also understand is that the alphabetically
first factor levels of my factors are somewhat hidden in the first two
coefficients (intercept and week).

BUT IN WHAT WAY ARE TWO DIFFERENT FACTOR_LEVELS HIDDEN IN THE SAME COEFFICIENT?
AND WHAT ABOUT THE INTERACTION TERMS FOR THOSE TWO?


Thanks for any help!

Maybe there is a way to use contrasts in some way that would make the output
easier to grab?

/B

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