Authors
Patrick E Shrout, Niall Bolger
Publication date
2002/12
Journal
Psychological methods
Volume
7
Issue
4
Pages
422
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
Mediation is said to occur when a causal effect of some variable X on an outcome Y is explained by some intervening variable M. The authors recommend that with small to moderate samples, bootstrap methods (B. Efron & R. Tibshirani, 1993) be used to assess mediation. Bootstrap tests are powerful because they detect that the sampling distribution of the mediated effect is skewed away from 0. They argue that RM Baron and DA Kenny's (1986) recommendation of first testing the X→ Y association for statistical significance should not be a requirement when there is a priori belief that the effect size is small or suppression is a possibility. Empirical examples and computer setups for bootstrap analyses are provided.
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