History of the MLM SIG

The MLM SIG was founded by J. Kyle Roberts and conducted its first AERA conference sessions in 2004 as HLM SIG.  Dr. Roberts recounts the SIG’s interesting origins:

The SIG was originally called “Inferential and Descriptive Bootstrapping and Resampling.” This SIG was started by Bruce Thompson at Texas A&M. We initially had about 50 members, but very quickly lost membership (and interest). When Xitao Fan was the Chair, I approached him and Bruce about switching the focus of the SIG to HLM.  I did this because it was becoming increasingly difficult to start a new SIG through the AERA hierarchy, but changing the focus of the SIG was not a big deal. Seeing that the IDBR SIG was dying a slow death, they agreed and I filed the papers early 2003.  I met with some people at the annual meeting of AERA that year and the IDBR membership voted unanimously to change the focus of the SIG. That’s how HLM SIG began in 2004. If memory serves right, we had two sessions that first year in addition to a standing room only business meeting where Steve Raudenbush spoke about Value-Added Modeling.

For the first several years the Chair was the sole officer.  The Vice Chair/Chair Elect was added in 2009 for the 2010 conference.  This development provided the advantage of a succession process with a continuous institutional memory.  The Treasurer was added in 2010 for the 2011 conference.  In 2012 members voted to change the name to Multilevel Modeling SIG (MLM SIG) to better represent the prevailing terminology in the field.

An impressive aspect of the SIG’s history is the quality of the keynote speakers, which includes many of the most highly esteemed multilevel modeling scholars.  The table below summarizes our conference history.  Thanks to all past Chairs for their contribution to this document and to the SIG.