Weighting analysis in Lme4

 Dear Mr Bolker,

I am a PHD student in Public Health and I am currently working on data
collected with a  complex survey design. These data were collected in 5
different districts/ strata (codpref) and 162 villages/cluster (numvill).
In each village a representative sample of mother-infant pairs was
surveyed. Some mother-infant pairs come from the same household (household=
idmen).
In order to consider those three interlocked levels I've done mixed model
using the lme4 package in R

glmer(undernutrition~household food insecurity+(1|codpref)+(1|numv
ill)+(1|idmen),data=menme,family=binomial)

I am wondering if I should weight my analysis in order to take into account
the survey weights (pond) as the "survey package" would have done it.

I saw in the R documentation that the argument "weight" exist in the lme4
package, does it correspond to survey weights? For instance, would it be
correct to write:

 glmer(undernutrition~household food
insecurity+(1|codpref)+(1|numvill)+(1|idmen),data=menme,
weight= pond, family=binomial)

I wanted to use the survey package but it does not allow me to do a mixed
model and thus to take into accound the household level (idmen).

I am really confused. What should I do?


Thanks a lot for your help.
Looking forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards.

Justine Briaux
PHD student
IRD, France

<r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org>

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