Multilevel Analysis

Cora J. M. Maas (Deceased)

Multilevel modeling is used in the analysis of data that have a clustered structure. Such data arise in various fields—for instance, in educational research, where pupils are nested in classes; in medical research, where patients are nested within hospitals; and also in political research, where individuals are nested in a social context. A crucial problem in the statistical analysis of clustered data is the dependencies between individual observations. For example, voters from the same city are not independent from one another, because they are all influenced by local policy. The statistical analysis performed on clustered data should account for this dependency. However, statistical analysis can also benefit from such dependency. The characteristics of different levels can be combined into one explanatory model and conclusions can be drawn about their effects, both at each level and in interaction. In the following sections, the multilevel model is explained and illustrated by means ...

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