Here - Tilburg University

Author and presenter
Fairbrother, Malcolm; University of Bristol
Title
On the Multiple Ways of Using Multilevel Models to Study Social Change
Abstract
Analyses of repeated cross-sectional survey data have relied increasingly
on multilevel/random effects models, in two ways. First, multilevel models have
been used to distinguish age, period, and cohort effects, where the goal is to
understand the mechanism by which some social change is occurring. Second,
models of survey respondents nested within social units (typically countries or
states) have been used to examine the effects of society-level conditions on
individual-level outcomes. Both approaches, however, provide limited insights
into the drivers of change over time. The former approach does not exploit
differences among societies experiencing more or less change, and the latter
does not distinguish longitudinal from cross-sectional variation. This paper
illustrates how to overcome these limitations, by group mean-centring time-
varying covariates—allowing for longitudinal effects to be distinguished from
cross-sectional effects—and by fitting growth curves at the group level. Growth
curves, where units of analysis are presumed to have unique random slopes for
time, allow for the rate of some social change to be a function of a time-
invariant covariate. This is the relationship many social theories implicitly
expect, no matter whether change is mostly due to period or cohort effects. The
paper concludes with an application to the study of why religiosity has declined
(or secularism expanded) in some countries and not others.