Analytic Models
The internal consistency of a person measure will depend on the intercorrelation among items and the number of items in a scale.The internal consistency of a neighborhood measure will depend in part on these factors, but it will hinge more on the degree of intersubjective agreement among informants in their ratings of the neighborhood in which they share membership and on the sample size of informants per neighborhood (26). To study reliability, we therefore formulated a hierarchical statistical model representing item variation within persons, personvariation within neighborhoods, and variation between neighborhoods. Complicating
the analysis is the problem of missing
data: inevitably, some persons will fail to
respond to some questions in an interview.
We present our hierarchical model as a series
of nested models, one for each level in the
hierarchy (27).
Level 1 model. Within each person, Yijk,
the ith response of person j in neighborhood
k, depends on the person’s latent perception
of collective efficacy plus error: