How to do multilevel HLM analysis with SPSS
SPSS is not very HLM friendly. It has the stats, but it's not very intuitive and plotting things to see the results isn't straightforward. Still, it's possible.
(can find more resources in the forum discussion here)
Getting started guides
Been struggling with this at the beginning, but these guides really helped :
- This is the first clear tutorial that got me started - Estimating Multilevel Models using SPSS, Stata, SAS, and R, see the SPSS section.
- If you prefer it academic style, here's an academic paper on the SPSS mixed method procedure for multi-level - USING THE SPSS MIXED PROCEDURE TO FIT CROSS-SECTIONAL AND LONGITUDINAL MULTILEVEL MODELS
Need three-level analyses?
Plotting
Need to plot the results? Not very easy, but this should help :
However, as a first step, you can use the simple two-way regression plots and plug-in the values.
Videos
If you're more of a visual person, there are a few videos that can explain a bit about the SPSS Mixed function, but those videos are all about repeated measures (two or more item periods), but the idea for other cross-sectional multi-level is pretty similar.
Other very useful videos:
- How to use the mixed model procedure in SPSS (also see this very useful page)