Multilevel

Linear
Modeling

Heather Kennedy
CURR 7004
Dr. Bista
Objectives
Understand how to preform a multilevel
model
Understand assumptions of multilevel
model
Report SPSS outputs in APA tables and
descriptions
Question: 12.1
Is there significant variability among
participants in the average Distance (in
mm from center of pituitary to
pterymaxillary fissure) across ages? Is
there a linear relation between the within
subject variable Age and Distance? Is
there a quadratic relation between Age
and Distance?
Problem 12.1 page 259/ using growthstudy.sav
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
 Output

No cases were missing from this data set.

There were 27 participants from ages 8-14
years old.
Output

Check the means for a

linear trend (green
circle) each one
progressively gets
larger.

Look at skewness for

normal distributions
(green square). Each
are lower than 1.0,
which suggest normal
distributions

Means and Medians

are similar for each
age, which suggests, it
is distributed normally.
Interpreting the Output
The descriptives table tells us that the
gradual increase of the Means show us
there was linear growth as the children
aged.
Now that the descriptives test is run and
we have checked from a linear trend and
skewness, the research question can be
answered.
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
SPSS Steps
Interpretation of Output

Linear effect is significant, while the quadratic

effect is not.
Interpretation of Output

The with-in age variance is 2.11 and the significance of

the intercept means there is a significance between
individuals of different ages.
What to report in writing
The unconditional repeated-measures model revealed that there was a
significant variability in the distance measure, suggesting that it would be
worthwhile to examine a conditional model that could potentially explain
some of this variability. (The assumptions of independent observations at the
level above the nesting, bivariate normality, linear relationships, and
random residuals were checked and met.) The linear trend for age was a
statistically significant predictor of changes in the distance measure,
t(78.55) = 2.25, p = .027. On the other hand the quadratic trend for age
was not significant, indicating that age was related to the distance for
center of pituitary to pteryomaxillary fissure measure in a linear manner.
Examination of the means for the age four supported this, indicating that
there was a steady, linear increase in the measure from age 8 until age 12
periods (M = 22.19, 23.17, 24.65, and 26.09; SD = 2.43, 2.16, 2.82, and 2.77 for
ages 8, 10, 12, and 14 respectively.) There was also a substantial and
statistically significant within-age and between-subject variance (see table
1). In contrast, it appear unnecessary to model to covariance matrix as a
first-order autoregressive matrix; there were small no significant intraclass
correlations among adjacent age levels in the distance variable, rho = .047,
Wald Z = .273, p = .783. Thus scores for each age level were relatively
independent of one another once overall distances between individuals
were taken into account (pg 267)
What Output to Report?
Resources:
Leech, N. L., Barrett, K. C., & Morgan, G.
A. (2015). IBM SPSS for intermediate
statistics: use and interpretation. New
York, NY: Routledge.