The Spit Camp II, Multi-level Modeling (MLM) Workshop, gives attendees foundational knowledge in MLM and its application to salivary bioscience research for correlated data. This fee-based workshop will cover the theory behind MLM as a general technique, as well as provide attendees with the knowledge and skills needed for exploratory data analysis, and MLM model fitting, diagnostics, and interpretation. Example data will be provided, and participants are encouraged to bring their own repeated measures/longitudinal data. Attendees will have the opportunity to practice MLM methods with their own data set(s) and receive individualized feedback on their estimation procedures and findings.
This Camp is designed for researchers who have already collected and cleaned their salivary data and have a research question that is best addressed within an MLM approach. Example analyses will be presented using different R statistical packages. It is recommended that campers be comfortable using R and reading R output. R is a free software and can be downloaded from the web at www.r-project.org. Abbreviated tutorials in R will be provided depending on the familiarity of the attendees with the R environment. This course will cover mainly regression methods (brief theory and extensive application) with an emphasis on repeated measures and longitudinal data (e.g., diurnal salivary concentrations and concentrations collected across a stressor task). Other methods such as spline mixed effect models and non-linear methods will also be briefly covered. Problems and solutions will be motivated from a statistical perspective. The Spit Camp II MLM Workshop for correlated data will give salivary bioscientists new to MLM the opportunity to use these methodologies in answering complex research questions.
