Bootstrapping Measurement Error in Multilevel models

Statistical techniques have been applied to the investigation of societal questions literally for centuries, indeed before such bodies of knowledge as sociology, psychology or even statistics were identified as disciples worthy of study. Thus some 18th Century clergymen considered that they had used published statistics to prove the existence of God.

The underlying assumption in the application of statistical techniques to any kind of data is that the observations made (behaviours, events, test scores, etc) represent only a sample of the possible observations (known as the population), but that this sample is in some way representative of all observations, so that it a result for a sample may be used to predict the result for the population.