I'm working on the following model in R: Generalized linear mixed model fit by maximum likelihood ['glmerMod'] Family: binomial (logit) Formula: Tooluse ~ Sex + Age + Frequency + Tool.related.skill + (1|Trial) + (1 + Frequency|Subjectnumber) + (1 + Tool.related.skill|Frequency/Task) Data: g4 with Tooluse (yes, no) age (continuous) tool.related.skill (ordinal) trial (1-4) frequency (low, high) task (1-12, nested within frequency. 6 tasks belong to the low frequency group, 6 tasks to high frequency) My research question looks at the effect of the frequency variable on tool use. Testing the model assumptions, I get this output for the test of overdispersion: > overdisp.test (B1NF.FULL) >> chisq df P dispersion.parameter >> 1 36.68702 141 1 0.2601916 How can I deal with the problem of **underdispersion**? So far I got 3 suggestions (2 of them from one of the authors of the lme4 package): 1) using **mixture/hurdle** models 2) allowing a **negative correlation structure** within groups (which can't be done with lme4 and is harder for GLMMs in general) 3) standard **'quasi-likelihood' approach**, i.e. taking the estimated level of underdispersion and shrinking all the confidence intervals accordingly as a first approach. However, I got warned that the thing to be careful about there is that it has yet to be figured out how quasi-likelihood estimates of 'residual' variance interact with the estimates of the random effects variances I would greatly appreciate any opinions and especially any help on how to implement any of these strategies in R. I feel kind of lost here. Thank you very much in advance for your help.