Influential Cases in Multilevel Modeling: A Methodological Comment.

Research methodology evaluation; Data analysis; Sociology methodology; Research methodology; Multilevel models; Multivariate analysis

The article presents a research note addressing the methodology used to analyze cross-national survey datasets in U.S. sociology. Several cases using multilevel modeling are cited and discussed, pointing out flaws in the research method design and proposing possible solutions or indicators to correct them. Also discussed is a system for the use of visual data from scatter plots and numeric data from multivariate hierarchical modeling techniques to identify and exclude "influential case" exceptions in result sets.