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Cited by 312

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology

Open access
Houslay, Thomas M, Wilson, Alastair J·2017·Behavioral Ecology

Abstract

Having recognized that variation around the population-level “Golden Mean” of labile traits contains biologically meaningful information, behavioural ecologists have focused increasingly on exploring the causes and consequences of individual variation in behaviour. These are exciting new directions for the field, assisted in no small part by the adoption of mixed-effects modelling techniques that enable the partitioning of among- and within-individual behavioural variation. It has become commonplace to extract predictions of individual random effects from such models for use in subsequent analyses (for example, between a personality trait and other individual traits such as cognition, physiology, or fitness-related measures). However, these predictions are made with large amounts of error that is not carried forward, rendering further tests susceptible to spurious P values from these individual-level point estimates. We briefly summarize the problems with such statistical methods that are used regularly by behavioural ecologists, and highlight the robust solutions that exist within the mixed model framework, providing tutorials to aid in their implementation.

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Metadata

Authors
Houslay, T. M., & Wilson, A. J.
Venue
Behavioral Ecology
Published
2017-03-02
Volume
28
Issue
4
Pages
948-952
ISSN
  • 1045-2249 (ISSN-L)
  • 1465-7279
OpenAlex
W2592003945
Cited by
312
References
77
FWCI
24.06
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/beheco/arx023
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Houslay, T. M., & Wilson, A. J. (2017). Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology. Behavioral Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arx023

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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