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I don't know much about your study design details, and there are situations
where it would matter to include such nested groupings.  For example,
imagine that some of the "items" were problems with very similar solutions,
and after solving one of them, it was easier to solve subsequent ones of
the same type.  The random grouping of items might have led to one fairly
homogeneous item group (that would be easier) and other item groups that
were more heterogeneous (and harder).  In such a circumstance, the nested
grouping would capture the extent to which the random groupings yielded
non-balanced groups (with respect to some dimension that is desirable to
balance, such as "difficulty" in this example).

If you are worried about this possibility, then use the nested group syntax
as previously suggested.  On the other hand, if you are confident in your
assertion that "the groups do not have any theoretical relations and all
was divided totally randomly" and thus believe that the groups are
equivalent/balanced on all the dimensions that matter, then it is unlikely
that modeling the nesting is going to yield different answers / better
model fits / etc.  But as I said before, your dataset is small enough that
you could just try it both ways and compare the two models...



On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 12:32 AM, Meir Barneron <meir.barneron at gmail.com>
wrote: