Estimating individual treatment effects from multiple-baseline data: A Monte Carlo study of multilevel-modeling approaches

While conducting intervention research, researchers and practitioners are often interested in how the intervention functions not only at the group level, but also at the individual level. One way to examine individual treatment effects is through multiple-baseline studies analyzed with multilevel modeling. This analysis allows for the construction of confidence intervals, which are strongly recommended in the reporting guidelines of the American Psychological Association. The purpose of this study was to examine the accuracy of confidence intervals of individual treatment effects obtained from multilevel modeling of multiple-baseline data. Monte Carlo methods were used to examine performance across conditions varying in the number of participants, the number of observations per participant, and the dependency of errors. The accuracy of the confidence intervals depended on the method used, with the greatest accuracy being obtained when multilevel modeling was coupled with the Kenward—Roger method of estimating degrees of freedom.