Understanding and estimating the power to detect cross-level interaction effects in multilevel modeling.

Cross-level interaction effects lie at the heart of multilevel contingency and interactionism theories. Researchers have often lamented the difficulty of finding hypothesized cross-level interactions, and to date there has been no means by which the statistical power of such tests can be evaluated. We develop such a method and report results of a large-scale simulation study, verify its accuracy, and provide evidence regarding the relative...