Multilevel Modelling for Public Health and Health Services Research

Alastair Leyland, PhD, is professor of Population Health Statistics and associate director of the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, UK. He has been working in public health for over 30 years and is currently the advisor to the Research Pillar of the European Public Health Association. His research interests are in the measurement and analysis of inequalities in health, particularly using administrative data, and in the evaluation of the effects of social policies on health. Peter Groenewegen, PhD, is a senior researcher and former director at NIVEL, the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, in Utrecht. He is emeritus professor at Utrecht University in the Departments of Sociology and of Human Geography. Peter was trained as a sociologist and wrote his PhD on the spatial distribution of general practitioners in the Netherlands. His research interests are in the area of international comparisons of health systems with a focus on primary health care, medical practice variations, and environment and health.

Part I: Theoretical, conceptual and methodological background.- Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Health in context.- Chapter 3: What is multilevel modelling?.- Chapter 4: Multilevel data structures.- Part II: Statistical background.- Chapter 5: Graphs and equations.- Chapter 6: Apportioning variation in multilevel models.- Part III: The modelling process and presentation of research.- Chapter 7: Context, composition and how their influences vary.- Chapter 8: Ecometrics: Using MLA to construct contextual variables from individual data.- Chapter 9: Modelling strategies.- Chapter 10: Reading and writing.- Part IV: Tutorials with example datasets.- Chapter 11: Multilevel linear regression using MLwiN: Mortality in England and Wales, 1979-1992.- Chapter 12. Multilevel logistic regression using MLwiN: Referrals to physiotherapy.- Chapter 13. Untangling context and composition using MLwiN: Incidence of cardiovascular disease in small areas in Scotland.