ArticlePsychological methods2021
The measurement of the mediator and its influence on statistical mediation conclusions.
Article in Psychological methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using causal mediation to examine self-efficacy as a mechanism through which continuing care interventions reduce alcohol use.Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors · 2024Trial
- Associations between perceived natural environmental features and physical activity intention: the mediating roles of perceived safety and perceived environmental restorativeness.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Supervisors' Academic Supervising Behaviors and Graduate Students' Academic Thriving: The Mediating Roles of Admiration and Task Engagement.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Beyond mediators: A critical review and methodological path forward for studying mechanisms in alcohol use treatment research.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2024Review
- Heterogeneity in response to treatment across tinnitus phenotypes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Specifying the psychosocial pathways whereby child and adolescent adversity shape adult health outcomes.Psychological medicine · 2023Article
- The trouble with triples: Examining the impact of measurement error in mediation analysis.Genetics · 2023Article
- Estimating latent baseline-by-treatment interactions in statistical mediation analysis.Structural equation modeling : a multidisciplinary journal · 2023Article
- Causal Mediation Analysis in Single Case Experimental Designs: Introduction to the Special Issue.Evaluation & the health professions · 2022Article
- The Effect of Noninvariance on the Estimation of the Mediated Effect in the Two-Wave Mediation Model.Structural equation modeling : a multidisciplinary journal · 2022Article
- Clarifying the Implicit Assumptions of Two-Wave Mediation ModelsFrontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Trust in Robots: Challenges and Opportunities.Current robotics reports · 2020Review
- Accommodating a Latent XM Interaction in Statistical Mediation Analysis.Multivariate behavioral researchArticle
- Evaluating Response Shift in Statistical Mediation Analysis.Advances in methods and practices in psychological scienceArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In psychology, the causal process between 2 variables can be studied with statistical mediation analysis. To make a causal interpretation about the relation between variables, researchers who use the statistical mediation model make many assumptions about the variables in the model, among which are measurement assumptions about the mediator. For example, researchers often assume that the measure of the mediator yields scores that are reliable and that have a valid interpretation. In this article, we address how several measurement challenges affect the conclusions of statistical mediation analysis, and how researchers can use different psychometric models to study theoretically different causal processes. We use simulated data sets to illustrate how 10 well-fitting and theoretically sound statistical mediation models could significantly detect the indirect effect or miss it entirely depending on how the mediator is represented in the model. In the example, power to detect the indirect effect varied by the amount of true mediator variance that the psychometric model of the mediator was able to isolate. Different strategies to incorporate psychometric methods into mediation research are discussed and future directions are considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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