The Consequence of Ignoring a Level of Nesting in Multilevel Analysis: A Comment.

This short contribution is a comment on M. Moerbeek's exploration of consequences of ignoring a level of clustering in a multilevel model, which was published in the first issue of the 2004 volume of Multivariate Behavioral Research. After having recapitulated the framework and extended the results of Moerbeek's study, we formulate two critical notes. First, we point at the incompleteness of the conclusions drawn by Moerbeek from the analytical work. The second note is concerned with the limitations of the framework itself.