Although all introductions on regression seem to be based on the assumption of data that is distributed normally, in practice this is not the case. Many other types of distributions exist. To name a few: normal distribution, binomial distribution, poisson, gaussian and so on. The lmer()-function in the lme4-package can easily estimate models based on these distributions. This is done by adding the ‘family’-argument to the command syntax, thereby specifying that not a linear multilevel model needs to be estimated, but a generalized linear model.
