RMediation: An R package for mediation analysis confidence intervals

This article describes the RMediation package,which offers various methods for building confidence intervals (CIs) for mediated effects. The mediated effect is the product of two regression coefficients. The distribution-of-the-product method has the best statistical performance of existing methods...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavior research methods 2011-09, Vol.43 (3), p.692-700
Main Authors: Tofighi, Davood, MacKinnon, David P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral psychology
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Confidence Intervals
Models, Statistical
Normal distribution
Probability
Psychology
Research Design
Software
Software packages
Statistical analysis
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Summary:This article describes the RMediation package,which offers various methods for building confidence intervals (CIs) for mediated effects. The mediated effect is the product of two regression coefficients. The distribution-of-the-product method has the best statistical performance of existing methods for building CIs for the mediated effect. RMediation produces CIs using methods based on the distribution of product, Monte Carlo simulations, and an asymptotic normal distribution. Furthermore, RMediation generates percentiles, quantiles, and the plot of the distribution and CI for the mediated effect. An existing program, called PRODCLIN, published in Behavior Research Methods , has been widely cited and used by researchers to build accurate CIs. PRODCLIN has several limitations: The program is somewhat cumbersome to access and yields no result for several cases. RMediation described herein is based on the widely available R software, includes several capabilities not available in PRODCLIN, and provides accurate results that PRODCLIN could not.
ISSN:1554-3528
1554-351X
1554-3528
DOI:10.3758/s13428-011-0076-x