Research themes and projects at the Centre for Womens Health, Gender and Society
Project title
Methodological research for multilevel and spatial data analysis
Major research theme
Investigator
- Professor Anne Kavanagh, CWHGS, School of Population Health, The University of Melbourne
Funding
- Work conducted as part of AHIP: NHMRC Population Health Capacity Building Grant, 2005-2009, $2,444,000
Summary
Various methodological issues have arisen in multi-level studies where interest is in area-level effects, such as VicLANES and other datasets available to investigators in the Australian Health Inequities Program.
Several issues that arise in the analysis of multi-level data, and in particular, multi-level binary data, are being investigated. With binary data, the intra-class correlation (ICC) is not straightforward to estimate. Several methods for estimating the ICC will be compared. Methods for dealing with over- and under-dispersion will be examined. Methods for handling missing data in multi-level studies will be evaluated and implemented. Analytic techniques for appropriately handling spatially correlated data will also be compared.