www.cmm.bristol.ac.uk/forum

I've just tested this with the tutorial dataset by recoding some of the schools, and you're right. I get the following message before it tries to fit the model: The data must be sorted according to the order of the model hierarchy: school student. So I guess that eliminates that as a possible cause.

MLwiN calculated residuals in a short form with one row per level 2 unit, i.e. countid|residual -------+--------- 1 | 0.2 2 | 0.3 we then merge this back into the original data (if I remember correctly using the level identifier). If your level identifier isn't unique for each unit of that level, i....

It's hard to say exactly what's going wrong here without the data, however we have seen this message before where each unit at a level didn't have a unique id ( http://www.cmm.bristol.ac.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=419 ). Could you please confirm whether each value of countid is unique to only ...

We have done some investigation of this behaviour and it appears that if you use robust standard errors, set the estimation method to RIGLS and run the model with the Start button then you will get slightly incorrect results. This should be fixed in the next release of MLwiN.

The best documentation that I know of for using weights in MLwiN is the following:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/software/s ... ights.html

Assuming that you restarted Stata after the update I'm not sure what would be causing this. strtoreal ( http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?mf_strtoreal ) is function that should be part of Stata. You should be able to check whether there is anything else to update with the command update query If you sti...

It sounds as if you may not have Stata fully up to date. According to http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew11 the putmata command was added to Stata 11 in the 11feb2010 update. Ideally you would update Stata with the following command: update all If for some reason you are unable to do this then yo...

Could you please try running the command again, but this time with the option viewfullmacro added to the end?, i.e. runmlwin normexam cons standlrt, level2(school: cons) level1(student: cons) nopause viewfullmacro This should pop up a window containing the MLwiN commands to fit the model. Could you ...

To answer your other question, runmlwin should support factor variables in the fixed part but this hasn't been widely tested.

You can turn off this error message by searching for the following text in runmlwin.ado: if `numrp`l'vars' == 0 { if "`diagonal'"~="" || "`elements'"~="" || "`reset'"~="" || "`residuals'"~="" || "`weightvar'"~=...