DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwf171 Invited Commentary: Advancing Theory and Methods for Multilevel Models of Residential Neighborhoods and Health

In less than 10 years, the field of epidemiology has been transformed. During this time, multilevel modeling has gone from a little-known and perhaps even unwelcome method of analysis to a household name. Multilevel models appeared much earlier in the fields of demography, sociology of education, and criminology (refer, for example, to Rauden-bush et al. (1), Mason et al. (2), and Nuttal et al. (3)), but public health and epidemiology have lagged behind in conceptualizing and measuring how contexts affect indi-vidual-level health risks and outcomes. The growth in the publication of multilevel studies has paralleled and contrib-uted greatly to the reemergence of social epidemiologic research (4–11). Multilevel models assessing the effects of neighborhood residential environments on health outcomes have been the most common type of contextual study to date