Mediation analysis for common binary outcomes

The Implications of Using Binary Outcomes in Mediation Analysis.

To the Editor: We were interested to read the study by Carriere and colleagues in the December 2015 issue of The Journal of Pain that tested a theory of the psychological processes that underlie the development of poor outcome in patients with whiplash injuries. Because these processes have been largely untested, the findings hold significant potential to improve our understanding of this diffi...

SAS macros for testing statistical mediation in data with binary mediators or outcomes.

BACKGROUND Statistical mediation is an important tool in behavioral health sciences, but it has been confined primarily to continuous variables. As prevention studies become increasingly common, more often the mediator or outcome is binary. Recent work by D. P. MacKinnon and J. H. Dwyer (1993) has explicated the steps necessary to estimate models for mediation when the mediator or the outcome i...

mediation: R Package for Causal Mediation Analysis

In this paper, we describe the R package mediation for conducting causal mediation analysis in applied empirical research. In many scientific disciplines, the goal of researchers is not only estimating causal effects of a treatment but also understanding the process in which the treatment causally affects the outcome. Causal mediation analysis is frequently used to assess potential causal mecha...

Commentary: Using Potential Outcomes to Understand Causal Mediation Analysis

We begin our discussion by congratulating Maxwell, Cole, and Mitchell (2011; hereafter MCM) for providing a thought-provoking article that tackles the challenging problem of conducting mediation analysis in longitudinal settings. As MCM clearly demonstrated, although mediation analysis plays an essential role in psychological research, conducting such an analysis requires researchers to underst...

Multilevel Models for Meta-analysis of Studies with Binary Outcomes