First of all thank you for the responses. I appreciate the suggestions i have received thus far.
Just to reiterate I am trying to analyze a data set that has been collected from a hierarchical sampling design. The model should be a mixed model nested ANOVA. The purpose of my study is to analyze the variability at each spatial scale in my design (random factors, variance components), and say something about the variability between regions (fixed factor, contrast of means). The data is as follows; region (fixed) Location (random) Site(random) site nested in location nested in region. Also i have read in Quinn and Keough 2002, design and analysis of experiments for biologists, that a variance component analysis should only be conducted after a rejection of the null hypothesis of no variance at that level. I have tried to implement mod1<-lmer(density ~ 1 + (1|site) + (1|location) + (1|region)) However, as i understand it, this treats all my factors as random. Plus I do not know how to extract SS or MS from this model. anova(mod1) gives me Analysis of Variance Table Df Sum Sq Mean Sq and summary(mod1) gives me Linear mixed-effects model fit by REML Formula: density ~ 1 + (1 | site) + (1 | location) + (1 | region) AIC BIC logLik MLdeviance REMLdeviance 15658 15678 -7825 15662 15650 Random effects: Groups Name Variance Std.Dev. site (Intercept) 22191 148.97 location (Intercept) 33544 183.15 region (Intercept) 41412 203.50 Residual 696189 834.38 number of obs: 960, groups: site, 4; location, 4; region, 3 Fixed effects: Estimate Std. Error t value (Intercept) 261.3 168.7 1.549 from what i understand the variance in the penultimate column are my variance components. But how do i conduct my significance test? I have also tried mod1<-lmer(density ~ region + (1|site) + (1|location)) Which i think is the correct mixed model for my design. However once again i do not know how to evaluate significance for the random factors. Thank-you again for any additional advice i receive Stephen Cole ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.