Population Health InfoShare: Sharing Knowledge to Improve Public Health Worldwide.

bookbag My BookBag:  0 Documents

The impact of community-level variables on individual-level outcomes, theoretical results and applications

Author: Angeles G, Guilkey DK, Mroz TA 
InfoShare Partner: MEASURE Evaluation
Publication Date: April 2008
Type of Document: Article/Report/Paper
Topics: Policy/Law
Region: Global
Language: English
Number of Pages: 46
File Size: 4 KB
File Format: Web Page

You should be able to view web pages in your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.)


Provide feedback on this document to MEASURE Evaluation

Your E-mail
Feedback
 

The authors study alternative estimators of the impacts of higher level variables in multilevel models. This is important since many of the important variables in social science research, such as school characteristics, community level access to family planning facilities, and other community level factors, are higher level factors having impacts on many lower level outcomes such as school achievement and contraceptive use. While the large sample properties of alternative estimators for these models are well known, there is little evidence about the relative performance of these estimators in the sample sizes typical in social science research. We attempt to fill this gap by presenting evidence about point estimation and standard error estimation for both two- and three-level models. A major conclusion of the paper is that readily available commercial software can be used to obtain both reliable point estimates and coefficient standard errors in models with two or more levels as long as appropriate corrections are made for possible error correlations at the highest level.