STATISTICS IN MEDICINE
Statist. Med. 2002; 21:3291–3315 (DOI: 10.1002/sim.1264)

TUTORIAL IN BIOSTATISTICS

Multilevel modelling of medical data

Harvey Goldstein;, William Browne and Jon Rasbash

Institute of Education; University of London; London; U.K.

SUMMARY

This tutorial presents an overview of multilevel or hierarchical data modelling and its applications in medicine. A description of the basic model for nested data is given and it is shown how this can be extended to
flexible models for repeated measures data and more complex structures involving cross-classi
cations and multiple membership patterns within the software package MLwiN. A variety of response types are covered and both frequentist and Bayesian estimation methods are described.

Copyright: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

KEY WORDS: complex data structures; mixed model, multilevel model; random eects model;
repeated measures