runmlwin: A Program to Run the MLwiN Multilevel Modeling Software from within Stata

Abstract

We illustrate how to fit multilevel models in the MLwiN package seamlessly from within Stata using the Stata program runmlwin. We argue that using MLwiN and Stata in combination allows researchers to capitalize on the best features of both packages. We provide examples of how to use runmlwin to fit continuous, binary, ordinal, nominal and mixed response multilevel models by both maximum likelihood and Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation.