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fixed vs random

Terms such as (gender|candidate) estimate a gender effect that can
vary across candidates. It is presumably meaningless to discuss the
gender effect of any individual candidate, so this term should not be
used.

The form of m2 is preferred to m1 in most cases when you have a
legitimate random slope variable, for example if you had a factor
"difficulty" referring to the difficulty of the questions, it would be
meaningful to estimate the effect of question difficulty separately
for each candidate, so a model like

m3 <- lmer(score ~ 1 + gender + difficulty + (difficulty|candidate), mg2006_sub)

might be sensible, but not one with gender as a random slope over candidate.

Dan

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Iasonas Lamprianou
<lamprianou at yahoo.com> wrote: