Multilevel Analysis for Applied Research: It's Just Regression!

Methodology in the Social Sciences

by Robert Bickel

This book provides a uniquely accessible introduction to multilevel modeling, a powerful tool for analyzing relationships between an individual-level dependent variable, such as student reading achievement, and individual-level and contextual explanatory factors, such as gender and neighborhood quality. Helping readers build on the statistical techniques they already know, Robert Bickel emphasizes the parallels with more familiar regression models, shows how to do multilevel modeling using SPSS, and demonstrates how to interpret the results. He discusses the strengths and limitations of multilevel analysis and explains specific circumstances in which it offers (or does not offer) methodological advantages over more traditional techniques. Over 300 dataset examples from research on educational achievement, income attainment, voting behavior, and other timely issues are presented in numbered procedural steps.

355 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2007

Reviews

[Rachel Renbarger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad for a stats book. Most of the language is easy to understand, but he gets bogged down in examples that aren't always justified.

[Mari Liis · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is easy to read and the author does a good job of giving an overview of the basic concept of MLM. At the same time the explanations tend to be to long and you need to go through a lot of pages before arriving at the point of the chapter. The author tries to ease the reader into the more difficult parts, but ends up making things even more confusing by making contradictory statements to simplify the ideas in the beginning. So make sure you get through the entire thing before being confident that you have gotten all the facts. The text could be organised better, so it would be easier to skip some of the many and lenghty examples without losing any important information.

Overall it helped me a lot, but it was also a lot of work to find all the relevant paragraphs.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good for a conceptual intro to MLM, but his example data sets are confusing. I don't recommend as a tutorial for MLM.