Appropriate Assessment of Neighborhood Effects on Individual Health: Integrating Random and Fixed Effects in Multilevel Logistic Regression

The logistic regression model is frequently used in epidemiologic studies, yielding odds ratio or relative risk interpretations. Inspired by the theory of linear normal models, the logistic regression model has been extended to allow for correlated responses by introducing random effects. However, the model does not inherit the interpretational features of the normal model. In this paper, the authors argue that the existing measures are unsatisfactory (and some of them are even improper) when quantifying results from multilevel logistic regression analyses. The authors suggest a measure of heterogeneity, the median odds ratio, that quantifies cluster heterogeneity and facilitates a direct comparison between…

• IN
  Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
• FF
  Forskningsrådet för Arbetsliv och Socialvetenskap