Hi,
I have a hard time figuring this out. I have population data gathered from 7 consecutive censuses. I'm planning to use a model like this:

Code:
melogit y census x1 x2 x3 || dyad:
where "census" are the census years and my second level consists of dyads (parent-child pairs).

Although they are consecutive, it seems counterintuitive to treat census years as continuous since there is an interval of 10 years between each one. When running the model as continuous, I obtain a coefficient, but I'm not sure how to interpret it. I read somewhere that if time is taken at the same moment for everyone, it should be treated as a fixed effect. When I use i.census, my first census is omitted (which is correct in this case) but the last one also because of collinearity. Not sure what that means in this case. Since I'm following individuals in dyads over time (repeated measures), I assume that censoring in the last census is the issue.

Finally, I was wondering if time should not be considered at a higher level. I tested something like this:

Code:
melogit y x1 x2 x3 || year: || dyad:
but I got the message that initial values were not feasible.

Not sure how to deal with that. Any hint would be appreciated.