RMediation: An R package for mediation analysis confidence intervals
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Recent research indicates that between-person and within-person components of time-varying predictors must be disaggregated and both effects estimated in the same model.
“recent research72–74 indicates that one must disaggregate the between-person and within-person components of time-varying predictors (i.e., the mediators), and estimate both effects in the same model.”
From Evaluation of an integrated treatment to address smoking cessation and anxiety/depressive symptoms among people living with HIV: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (2021) · cites this paper as [72]
The Single-mediator model section describes a single-level mediation model, and the Abstract discusses confidence intervals for mediated effects. Neither passage addresses disaggregating time-varying mediators into between-person and within-person components or estimating both effects in one model. Searches for those terms and for longitudinal or multilevel mediation found no supporting passage in our copy; page numbers were not available. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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- Authors
- Tofighi, D., & MacKinnon, D. P.
- Affiliations
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Arizona State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Tofighi, Davood
- Venue
- Behavior Research Methods
- Published
- 2011-04-13
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 692-700
- ISSN
- 1554-351X (ISSN-L)
- 1554-3528
- PMC
- PMC3233842
- OpenAlex
- W1990041238
- Semantic Scholar
- c23b7aec27bf59eab2d3fb0691003af144f0dc5e
- Cited by
- 1,419
- References
- 18
- Citations by year
- 2026: 80 · 2025: 114 · 2024: 109 · 2023: 120 · 2022: 102 · 2021: 107 · 2020: 105 · 2019: 84 · 2018: 112 · 2017: 117 · 2016: 117 · 2015: 105 · 2014: 74 · 2013: 56 · 2012: 15
- FWCI
- 41.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Behavior Research Methods (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA 09757, F31DA027336, R01DA009757, R37DA009757)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Advanced Causal Inference Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Data Analysis with R
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
- Keywords
- mediation analysis, confidence intervals, indirect effects, Monte Carlo simulation, asymptotic normality, R package
- MeSH terms
- Probability, Research Design, Software, Models, Statistical, Confidence Intervals
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