Multilevel Modeling With Stat-JR SAAs: A Software Review

Abstract

Given the natural hierarchical structure in school-setting data, multilevel modeling (MLM) has been widely employed in education research using a number of different statistical software packages. The purpose of this article is to review a recent feature of Stat-JR, the statistical analysis assistants (SAAs) embedded in Stat-JR (Version 1.0.5), with regard to their use for MLM. In this article, we review the features of Stat-JR’s SAAs and illustrate how to implement SAAs, using one of the Stat-JR interfaces to analyze multilevel models for the 1982 High School and Beyond data set. Results from Stat-JR SAA are compared with the results using HLM7.01 software. We also discuss recommendations and implications for future users of SAAs.