To be sure, the type of research that would look at the connection between being read bed-time stories and robbing a store is very likely to use hierarchical li

To be sure, the type of research that would look at the connection between being read bed-time stories and robbing a store is very likely to use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which does produce predictions. For example, in his HLM book Andy Gelman looks at the relationship between radon in homes and lung cancer. Replace radon with being read stories, and lung cancer with robbing a neighborhood store, and you're in business. The key is that he interprets (with, say, confidence intervals) the model rather than emphasize null hypothesis significance testing.