Counterfactual Graphical Models for Longitudinal Mediation Analysis with Unobserved Confounding

Autor/in	Shpitser, Ilya
Titel	Counterfactual Graphical Models for Longitudinal Mediation Analysis with Unobserved Confounding
Quelle	In: Cognitive Science, 37 (2013) 6, S.1011-1035 (25 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0364-0213
DOI	10.1111/cogs.12058
Schlagwörter	Attribution Theory; Mediation Theory; Regression (Statistics); Guidelines; Longitudinal Studies; Models + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Mediationsverfahren; Regression; Regressionsanalyse; Richtlinien; Longitudinal study; Longitudinal method; Longitudinal methods; Längsschnittuntersuchung; Analogiemodell
Abstract	Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals in social psychology contain at least one mediation test (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, 2011). Standard parametric approaches to mediation analysis employ regression models, and either the "difference method" (Judd & Kenny, 1981), more common in epidemiology, or the "product method" (Baron & Kenny, 1986), more common in the social sciences. In this article, we first discuss a known, but perhaps often unappreciated, fact that these parametric approaches are a special case of a general counterfactual framework for reasoning about causality first described by Neyman (1923) and Rubin (1924) and linked to causal graphical models by Robins (1986) and Pearl (2006). We then show a number of advantages of this framework. First, it makes the strong assumptions underlying mediation analysis explicit. Second, it avoids a number of problems present in the product and difference methods, such as biased estimates of effects in certain cases. Finally, we show the generality of this framework by proving a novel result which allows mediation analysis to be applied to longitudinal settings with unobserved confounders. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10