Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Models (Part 3)
Week 12: March 23, 2025
Reading
Hayes, Andrew. (2018). Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis Chapters 7 - 10.
I have used these methods on several occasions, check out Barboza-Salerno & Remillard (2023).
- Barboza-Salerno, G. E., & Remillard, A. (2023). Early child adversity and delinquent behavior in foster care youth: do future expectations and sexual identity moderate the mediating role of posttraumatic stress?. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, 16(4), 945-957.
Introduction to the Topic
This week we continue to learn about advanced mediation models and effect moderation. To review, please see last week’s page
In-Class Files and Data Sets
Data sets:
– Our first example uses the presumed media influence study: pmi.sav to estimate a serial mediation of article importance and PMI jointly. – Next, we are going to use PRAMS data to examine potential pathways by which intimate partner violence prior to pregnancy impacts poor birth outcomes, i.e., low birth weight in infants. Please note that this is not only a public health issue, low birth weight disproportionately effects persons on the basis of race, and so it qualifies as a civil rights issue.
Moderation: Finally, we will learn about moderation effects, which we did not get to last week. We will use these files:
- Example 1: Dichotomous Moderation Effect, Sexual Minority. I saved the SPSS output
- Example 2: Continuous Moderation Effect, NSCAW
Lab Files
Mediation: You are going to do this lab using the NSCAW data to examine whether (1) children investigated for abuse or neglect who have witnessed severe violence at Wave 1 (EV_W1) are more likely to engage in externalizing behavior at Wave 3 (bcext3); and (2) post-traumatic stress at Wave 1 (tra1) is the mechanism violence exposure is linked to externalizing behavior.
Moderation: I have created some Excel output so you can learn how to take the output and visualize the results. One file plots the effect moderation for age on the association between post-traumatic stress and delinquent behaviors using a subset of the NSCAW. Now, you can use this file to practice making a similar chart using excel to answer the question: What is the effect moderation of sexual minority status on the association between post-traumatic stress and delinquent behavior?
Moderation in R: I have written the code to show you how to implement moderation in R.
Lecture Notes & Class Files
- Download today’s slides here
- I want us to assess our knowledge of mediation today
Resources
There are a number of mediation, moderation, and mediated moderation models that you can use to test various hypotheses. Once you have a basic familairity of the models they become intuitive. Model templates are located here.
Additional Notes
Stay calm and BE BRAVE.