Multilevel, Hierarchical Linear Models and Marketing - This Is Not Your Adviser's OLS Model

This chapter provides an introduction to hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) for marketing researchers. We begin by motivating why one might use HIM models, describing what they are and what research questions they can address. We then describe the techniques. We illustrate the models on a small data set, and we instruct potential adopters on how to fit the models via existing software so that the reader should he able to reproduce the results we present in this chapter. We also present findings from a larger, real data set to illustrate the substantive insights that may be gleaned from these models.