R Statistics Cookbook

Nested design

Let's suppose we want to measure a policy on the workforce at a particular company. Each employee naturally belongs to a particular area of the company. So, each employee is actually nested within a sector. We could assign a distinct letter to each employee within the same area. The model could now get confused, because every time Employee A is encountered, it won't be clear to which Employee A we are referring. This confusion can be avoided by telling R that this is a nested design. This is done by doing: (1|Employee/Area)

The following screenshot shows how the employees are nested in an area/department:

The key element here ...