What is mediation analysis?

Mediation analysis enables you to rigorously test hypotheses about indirect effects and extricate the complex causal pathways underlying outcomes of interest across diverse fields such as psychology, sociology, medicine, and public health. The following section further introduces the fundamental concepts of mediation analysis within the context of causal inference, distinguishing it from the related but distinct concept of moderation.

Definition and overview

Mediation analysis elucidates how an independent variable influences a dependent variable through intermediary variables known as mediators [1]. Specifically, this technique seeks to identify and quantify the indirect effects that mediate the relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable through one or more intervening variable mediators . It decomposes the total effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable into direct and indirect paths, providing insight...