The use of advanced quantitative methods within mixed methods research has been investigated in a limited capacity. In particular, hierarchical linear models are a popular approach to account for multilevel data, such as students within schools, but its use and value as the quantitative strand in a mixed methods study remains unknown. This article…

Multilevel models are an increasingly popular method to analyze data that originate from a clustered or hierarchical structure. To effectively utilize multilevel models, one must have an adequately large number of clusters; otherwise, some model parameters will be estimated with bias. The goals for this paper are to (1) raise awareness of the…

Educational researchers commonly use the rule of thumb of "design effect smaller than 2" as the justification of not accounting for the multilevel or clustered structure in their data. The rule, however, has not yet been systematically studied in previous research. In the present study, we generated data from three different models…