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Joop Hox. Multilevel Analysis: Techniques and Applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002, 304 pages, $79.95 hardcover, $37.50 softcover.
Multilevel methods seem to be en vogue these days. You know this if, like me, you have recently observed an increase in the frequency with which your reviewers say things like "Good paper, but I would like to see these data reanalyzed using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)." OK, maybe the "good paper" part isn't that frequent, but the "HLM" part certainly feels like it's on the rise. But in all seriousness, any recent upsurge in sensitivity to levels-of-analysis issues is long overdue. Such issues potentially exist in any data set with a hierarchical or "nested" structure, such as students nested within classes, employees nested within departments, or departments nested within companies. The basic premise of multilevel analysis is that, when variables at one level (e.g., the department) affect relations among variables at other levels (e.g., individual employees), care must be taken so that effects are not inadvertently collapsed to a single level or otherwise misinterpreted as occurring at the wrong level. Failure to accurately specify the appropriate variables and effects at each level when analyzing multilevel data can (and probably will) lead to substantial misinterpretation of results, so some familiarity with multilevel analysis methods should be considered mandatory for researchers working with organizational data. Indeed, training in multilevel analysis-a longtime staple of graduate programs in educational research-is becoming increasingly common in psychology programs, including industrial-organizational psychology programs.
Instructors wishing to introduce graduate students to multilevel analysis and researchers who just want to acquaint themselves with the topic (perhaps to appease those reviewers) should consider Hox's (2002) Multilevel Analysis: Techniques and Applications as a viable resource. Multilevel Analysis is the second volume in Erlbaum's Quantitative Methodology for Business and Management series to address multilevel analysis techniques (the other being Heck & Thomas, 2000). This book is best suited for students in education, management, and...