Strategies for Efficient Experimental Design in Studies Probing 2-1-1 Mediation

2020
When well-implemented, mediation analyses play a critical role in probing theories of action because their results help lay the ground work for the critical development of a treatment and the iterative advancement of theories that are foundational to a discipline. Despite strong interest in designs that incorporate mediation, few studies have developed effective and efficient strategies to plan experiments examining multilevel mediation. We probe several design strategies for cluster-randomized designs and derive sampling plans that maximize power under cost constraints. The results suggest that among the more durable design strategies for mediation is covariance adjustment on variables predictive of the outcome and optimal sample allocation. The statistical power and optimal sample allocation results are implemented in the R package PowerUpR.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION
页码:311-334|卷号:88|期号:2
ISSN:0022-0973
来源机构
University of Cincinnati
收录类型
SSCI
发表日期
2020
学科领域
循证教育学
国家
美国
语种
英语
DOI
10.1080/00220973.2018.1533796
其他关键词
RANDOMIZED-TRIALS; STATISTICAL POWER; ACHIEVEMENT; TESTS; COST
EISSN
1940-0683
资助机构
National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [1552535, 1760884]
资助信息
This project was partially supported by awards from the National Science Foundation [1552535, 1760884]. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not the funding agency.
被引频次(WOS)
2
被引更新日期
2022-01
关键词
Indirect effects mediation multilevel models optimal design power sample-size determination