Social Science Methodology Symposium held April 11, 2014
Sponsored by the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, College of Health and Human Sciences

PRESENTER:  Ben Kelcey, PhD, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Research Methodologies
                        College of Education, Criminal Justice & Human Services, University of Cincinnati

TITLE:  Opening Up the Blackbox: Design and Analysis of Multilevel Mediation

ABSTRACT:  A common approach to investigating the mechanisms through which a treatment is presumed to impact an outcome is a mediation analysis. Mediation analyses examine the extent to which a treatment has an indirect effect on an outcome by examining how changes in a mediator produced by exposure to a treatment come to change outcomes. Despite the critical role mediation analyses have historically played in social science research, literature examining methods for designing and analyzing mediation in cluster or multilevel settings is sparse. In this talk, I discuss recent developments in both the design and analysis of studies of multilevel mediation.