Multilevel Analysis for Applied Research: It's Just Regression! (Methodology in the Social Sciences)

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.

Robert Bickel, PhD, is Professor of Advanced Educational Studies at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where he teaches research methods, applied statistics, and the sociology of education. His publications have dealt with a broad range of issues, including high school completion, teen pregnancy, crime on school property, correlates of school size, neighborhood effects on school achievement, and the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 for poor rural schools. Before joining the faculty at Marshall University, Dr. Bickel spent 15 years as a program evaluator and policy analyst, working in a variety of state and local agencies.