Earlier this week, you practiced testing for moderation and mediation and, ideally, used the Collaboration Lab to ask, answer, and otherwise address any questions you had regarding moderation and mediation. In this Assignment, you apply what you learned to answer a social research question using multiple regression, including testing for possible moderation or mediation. Remember that you must still address all the assumptions for multiple regression.
NOTE You will choose either moderation or mediation for your statistics assignment where you conduct an analysis in SPSS. You need to use the other test for your journal article critique this week. This means if you do moderation in your SPSS assignment then you would choose an article for the journal article critique assignment where the author(s) used mediation. If you choose mediation for your SPSS assignment, then you would choose an article where the author(s) used moderation.
Based on the research question you created, complete the following tasks:
Fit a multiple regression model, testing whether a mediating variable partly or completely mediates the effect of an initial causal variable on an outcome variable. Think about whether or not the model will meet assumptions.
Fit the model, testing for mediation between two key variables.
Analyze the output, determining whether mediation was significant and how to interpret that result.
Reflect on possible implications of social change.
Write an analysis in APA format, including title page, references, and an appendix, that includes your data output and addresses each of the tasks listed above. The content should be 2–3 pages, including setup of the assignment, results, and interpretation of results. Your SPSS output should be included as an appendix.
Early in your Assignment, when you relate which dataset you analyzed, please include the mean of the following variables. If you are using the Afrobarometer Dataset, report the mean of Q1 (Age). If you are using the General Social Survey Dataset, report the mean of Age. If you are using the HS Long Survey Dataset, report the mean of X1SES. See pages 683 and 684 in your Warner textbook for an excellent APA-compliant write-up of a mediation analysis.