Dear R listers,
I know I'm breaking the rules by asking a "homework" related question-- 
I hope you'll forgive me. I am a social psychology graduate student,  
and the only one in my department who uses R. I successfully completed  
my multiple regression and structural equation modeling courses using  
R (John Fox's car and sem packages were a big help, as was his book).  
Now I am taking a hierarchical linear modeling course, and am hoping  
that I can use R for this also. I've searched the list archives, and  
consulted the one-line version of Pinheiro and Bates (available  
through my library), but I'm having a great deal of difficulty  
translating what I'm learning in class into lmer syntax. Specifically,  
the instructor is using HLM 6.0. In this program, one specifies the  
level one and level two models explicitly, and I'm having trouble  
understanding what the equivalent of this is in lmer. Most of the  
examples we cover in class are change models, i.e., we working with  
longitudinal data.

Specific questions:

in HLM 6.0, we build the following model;

Y = P0 + P1*(CONFLICT) + P2*(TIMEYRS) + E
Level-2 Model
P0 = B00 + B01*(H0MCITOT) + R0
P1 = B10 + B11*(H0MCITOT) + R1
P2 = B20 + B21*(H0MCITOT) + R2

Can someone explain to me how to represent this in lmer syntax? I've  
tried e.g.,

lmer(MAT ~ 1 + CONFLICT + TIMEYRS + (1 + CONFLICT +
+ TIMEYRS | H0MCITOT))

But I don't get the same result.

More generally: Should I be using the lme4 package, the nlme package,  
or something else entirely? Is there any documentation for the lme4  
package that is geared more towards novice users?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance for any help you can  
offer.

--Ista
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