Incorporating sources of correlation between outcomes: An introduction to mixed models

Animal research often involves measuring the outcomes of interest multiple times on the same animal, whether over time or for different exposures. These repeated outcomes measured on the same animal are correlated due to animal-specific characteristics. While this repeated measures data can address more complex research questions than single-outcome data, the statistical analysis must take into account the study design resulting in correlated outcomes, which violate the independence assumption of standard statistical methods (e.g. a two-sample t-test, linear regression). When standard statistical methods are incorrectly used to analyze correlated outcome data, the statistical inference (i.e. confidence intervals and p-values) will be incorrect, with some settings leading to null findings too often and others producing statistically significant findings despite no support for this in the data. Instead, researchers can leverage approaches designed specifically for correlated outcomes. In this article, we discuss common study designs that lead to correlated outcome data, motivate the intuition about the impact of improperly analyzing correlated outcomes using methods for independent data, and introduce approaches that properly leverage correlated outcome data.