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23 - Comment: Never-ending nets of moderators and mediators

from Part III - The study of interpersonal expectations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2009

Peter David Blanck
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Summary

Psychological social psychologists frequently discuss moderators and mediators, familiar concepts given systematic attention in Baron and Kenny's (1986) widely cited paper. Social psychologists linked to sociology, thinking of Morris Rosenberg's still useful 1968 book, are more likely to speak of specifiers or conditional variables than moderators, and to refer to mediators as intervening factors. Whether described as mediators and moderators or as conditional and intervening variables, these phenomena are the central concerns in the contributions to part III of this volume, and appropriately so, in view of the fact that they have occupied a substantial portion of Robert Rosenthal's scholarly attention.

Building on a review of selected points made by Baron and Kenny (1986) and by Rosenberg (1968), these concluding comments will consider ways in which the phenomena of moderation and mediation are represented in themes of the chapters that constitute part III. The exercise may suggest additional ways of thinking about the contributions to this part, generating along the way a few amendments to the Baron-Kenny and Rosenberg guidelines.

As noted in Baron and Kenny (1986), a moderator is a variable that interacts with the focal independent variable to influence the dependent variable. Within categories or across levels of a moderator, the strength and/or direction of the relationship between predictor and outcome vary. A moderator relationship is often represented in a path diagram with an arrow coming in perpendicular to the path linking the independent and dependent variables, as in Figure 23.1 A. In contrast, a mediator is a variable that “represents the generative mechanism through which the focal independent variable … influence(s) the dependent variable” (Baron & Kenny, 1986, p. 1173).

Type
Chapter
Information
Interpersonal Expectations
Theory, Research and Applications
, pp. 454 - 474
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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