Random effects models which describe the dependence via random effects in various correlated data have recently received considerable attention in the biomedical literature. They include mixed linear models (MLMs), generatized linear mixed models (GLMMS) and hierarchical generalized linear models (HGLMs). For the inference Lee and Nelder (2000) proposed the first-and second-order REML (restricted maximum likelihood) methods based on hierarchical-likelihood of tee and Welder (1996). In this paper, for Poisson-gamma HGLMs the new methods are theoretically compared with marginal likelihood methods and both methods are illustrated by two practical examples.