Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045-7556, USA.
Psychol Methods. 2010 Sep;15(3):209-33. doi: 10.1037/a0020141.
Several methods for testing mediation hypotheses with 2-level nested data have been proposed by researchers using a multilevel modeling (MLM) paradigm. However, these MLM approaches do not accommodate mediation pathways with Level-2 outcomes and may produce conflated estimates of between- and within-level components of indirect effects. Moreover, these methods have each appeared in isolation, so a unified framework that integrates the existing methods, as well as new multilevel mediation models, is lacking. Here we show that a multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) paradigm can overcome these 2 limitations of mediation analysis with MLM. We present an integrative 2-level MSEM mathematical framework that subsumes new and existing multilevel mediation approaches as special cases. We use several applied examples and accompanying software code to illustrate the flexibility of this framework and to show that different substantive conclusions can be drawn using MSEM versus MLM.
一些研究人员提出了使用多层次建模 (MLM) 范式来检验 2 级嵌套数据中介假设的方法。然而，这些 MLM 方法不适应具有 2 级结果的中介途径，并且可能会混淆间接效应的组间和组内成分的估计值。此外，这些方法各自孤立出现，因此缺乏整合现有方法以及新的多层次中介模型的统一框架。在这里，我们表明，多层次结构方程建模 (MSEM) 范式可以克服 MLM 中介分析的这两个局限性。我们提出了一个综合的 2 级 MSEM 数学框架，将新的和现有的多层次中介方法作为特例包含在内。我们使用几个应用实例和配套的软件代码来说明该框架的灵活性，并展示使用 MSEM 与 MLM 可以得出不同的实质性结论。
