ReviewEpidemiologic reviews2022
Assumptions Not Often Assessed or Satisfied in Published Mediation Analyses in Psychology and Psychiatry.
Review in Epidemiologic reviews, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cross-Sectional Studies: Strengths, Limitations, and Methodological Considerations.Journal of periodontal research · 2026Review
- Causal discovery methods in psychological research: Foundations, algorithms, and a practical tutorial in R.Behavior research methods · 2026Review
- Mediation analysis to identify causes of racial disparity in health outcomes: a comparison of model-based and outcome-based approaches.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Risk factors for spontaneous preterm birth are mediated through changes in cervical length.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Evaluating self-efficacy as a treatment mechanism during an intensive treatment program for posttraumatic stress disorder.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2025Article
- Toward New Directions in Human Biology: A Roadmap for Anthropological Causal Inference With Observational Data.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Inconsistent consistency: evaluating the well-defined intervention assumption in applied epidemiological research.International journal of epidemiology · 2025Review
- Practical challenges in mediation analysis: a guide for applied researchers.Health services & outcomes research methodology · 2025Article
- Mediational pathways among drug use initiation, use-related consequences, and quit attempts.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2024Article
- Scaling Interventions to Manage Chronic Disease: Innovative Methods at the Intersection of Health Policy Research and Implementation Science.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2024Article
- Longitudinal associations between anxiety sensitivity and substance use in adolescents: Mediation by depressive affect.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Using instrumental variables to address unmeasured confounding in causal mediation analysis.Biometrics · 2024Article
- Instrumental variable-based high-dimensional mediation analysis with unmeasured confounders for survival data in the observational epigenetic study.Frontiers in genetics · 2023Article
- Clarifying causal mediation analysis: Effect identification via three assumptions and five potential outcomes.Journal of causal inference · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mediation analysis aims to investigate the mechanisms of action behind the effects of interventions or treatments. Given the history and common use of mediation in mental health research, we conducted this review to understand how mediation analysis is implemented in psychology and psychiatry and whether analyses adhere to, address, or justify the key underlying assumptions of their approaches. All articles (n = 206) were from top academic psychiatry or psychology journals in the PsycInfo database and were published in English from 2013 to 2018. Information extracted from each article related to study design, covariates adjusted for in the analysis, temporal ordering of variables, and the specific method used to perform the mediation analysis. In most studies, underlying assumptions were not adhered to. Only approximately 20% of articles had full temporal ordering of exposure, mediator, and outcome. Confounding of the exposure-mediator and/or mediator-outcome relationships was controlled for in fewer than half of the studies. In almost none of the articles were the underlying assumptions of their approaches discussed or causal mediation methods used. These results provide insights to how methodologists should aim to communicate methods, and motivation for more outreach to the research community on best practices for mediation analysis.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.