Deleted from wrong section and moved. Apologies. Good afternoon. I am running two sets of analyses, one at the individual-level only, and the second with multi-level models. My dependent variable is a five-item Likert-scale. I am struggling with coding (and analytic strategy). The book and notes I typically consult for this are locked in my work office, which we are no longer allowed into. Do the standard MLM procedures (mixed, GLM, Glimmix, genmod) default to linear models, which are not appropriate for ordinal dependent variables? If so, what is the best approach for handling the ordinal variable? I am reading and have citations for running linear models with an ordinal variable in multi-level models, as multi-level fixed effects versions of ordinal logistic regression models are "notoriously difficult to interpret" and lead to biased estimates. If I were just running the multi-level models, I could get away with this. However, I still need to run similar individual-level models so that I can compare results; I don't think this would justify running OLS with an individual level variable. To complicate things, the proportional odds assumption is violated. Any help is appreciated, as I have committed these things to memory, apparently poorly, and am a bit stuck without my notes.
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