This book provides a clear introduction to this important area of statistics. The author provides a wide of coverage of different kinds of multilevel models, and how to interpret different statistical methodologies and algorithms applied to such models. This 4th edition reflects the growth and interest in this area and is updated to include new chapters on multilevel models with mixed response types, smoothing and multilevel data, models with correlated random effects and modeling with variance.
Harvey Goldstein (2006) studied this question.