When analyzing longitudinal data, do you use regression or structural equation based approaches? There are many types of longitudinal data and different approaches to analyzing them. Two popular approaches are a regression based approach and a structural equation modeling based approach.
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What’s the difference between Mixed and Multilevel Models? What about Hierarchical Models or Random Effects models?
I get this question a lot.
The answer: very little.
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Multilevel models and Mixed Models are generally the same thing. In our recent webinar on the basics of mixed models, Random Intercept and Random Slope Models, we had a number of questions about terminology that I’m going to answer here.
If you want to see the full recording of the webinar, get it here. It’s free.
Q: Is this different from multi-level modeling?
A: No. I don’t really know the history of why we have the different names, but the difference in multilevel modeling (more…)
Mixed models are hard.
They’re abstract, they’re a little weird, and there is not a common vocabulary or notation for them.
But they’re also extremely important to understand because many data sets require their use.
Repeated measures ANOVA has too many limitations. It just doesn’t cut it any more.
One of the most difficult parts of fitting mixed models is figuring out which random effects to include in a model. And that’s hard to do if you don’t really understand what a random effect is or how it differs from a fixed effect. (more…)
Meta-analysis is the quantitative pooling of data from multiple studies. Meta-analysis done well has many strengths, including statistical power, precision in effect size estimates, and providing a summary of individual studies.
But not all meta-analyses are done well. The three threats to the validity of a meta-analytic finding are heterogeneity of study results, publication bias, and poor individual study quality.
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If you are new to using generalized linear mixed effects models, or if you have heard of them but never used them, you might be wondering about the purpose of a GLMM.
Mixed effects models are useful when we have data with more than one source of random variability. For example, an outcome may be measured more than once on the same person (repeated measures taken over time).
When we do that we have to account for both within-person and across-person variability. A single measure of residual variance can’t account for both.
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