Abstract
The causal mediation literature has developed techniques to assess the sensitivity of an inference to pretreatment confounding, but these techniques are limited to the case of a single mediator. In this article, we extend sensitivity analysis to possible violations of pretreatment confounding in the case of multiple mediators. In particular, we develop sensitivity analyses under three alternative approaches to effect decomposition: (1) jointly considered mediators, (2) identifiable direct and indirect paths, and (3) interventional analogues effects. With reasonable assumptions, each approach reduces to a single procedure to assess sensitivity in the presence of simultaneous pre- and posttreatment confounding. We demonstrate our sensitivity analysis techniques with a framing experiment that examines whether anxiety mediates respondents’ attitudes toward immigration in response to an information prompt.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
