Developmental Origins of Ghosts and Angels in the Nursery: Adverse and Benevolent Childhood Experiences

Hypotheses involving mediation are common in the behavioral sciences. Mediation exists when a predictor affects a dependent variable indirectly through at least one intervening variable, or mediator. Methods to assess mediation involving multiple simultaneous mediators have received little attention in the methodological literature despite a clear need. We provide an overview of simple and multiple mediation and explore three approaches that can be used to investigate indirect processes, as well as methods for contrasting two or more mediators within a single model. We present an illustrative example, assessing and contrasting potential mediators of the relationship between the helpfulness of socialization agents and job satisfaction. We also provide SAS and SPSS macros, as well as Mplus and LISREL syntax, to facilitate the use of these methods in applications.

Principles for reporting analyses using structural equation modeling are reviewed, with the goal of supplying readers with complete and accurate information. It is recommended that every report give a detailed justification of the model used, along with plausible alternatives and an account of identifiability. Nonnormality and missing data problems should also be addressed. A complete set of parameters and their standard errors is desirable, and it will often be convenient to supply the correlation matrix and discrepancies, as well as goodness-of-fit indices, so that readers can exercise independent critical judgment. A survey of fairly representative studies compares recent practice with the principles of reporting recommended here.