Hello All I am using R to find the impact of ignoring clustering, when indicated by these tests, on bias, variance and inference of estimates of interest, including population totals and regression coefficients. But when U have used the apVar function using the command test.lme1$apVar to find the var-cov matrix I got the follwing error "Non-positive definite approximate variance-covariance" I think the problem was with my data which contain the following two columns m <- 250 g <- as.factor(rep(1:m,each=10)) y <- rnorm(10*m) test <- data.frame(cbind(g,y)) the lme model used was test.lme1 <- lme (y~1, data = test, random = ~1| g) This error affects the t-statistic value, which was NA for more than 240 value of the 250 values which I expect to have. Some times all t-stat values are NA and sometimes I don't have the NA result at all. I'll send you all of the simulation program which I've used. I hope you can help to solve this problem Thanks LOAI PhD student University of Wollongong Australia