Conducting Mediation Analysis in Marketing Research

Research ArticlesCarsten L. Demming is re-search assistant and doctoralstudent at the Chair of Market-ing and Consumer Behavior,University of Goettingen,Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3,37073 Goettingen, Germany,Phone: +49551/39-7270,Fax: +49551/39-5849,E-Mail: cdemmin@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de. Corresponding Author.Steffen Jahn#is assistant pro-fessor at the Chair of Marketingand Consumer Behavior,University of Goettingen,Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3,37073 Goettingen, Germany,Phone: +49551/39-7407,Fax: +49551/39-5849,E-Mail: steffen.jahn@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de.#The first two authors contri-buted equally to this research.Yasemin Boztu ̆gis Professor ofMarketing and ConsumerBehavior, University of Goettin-gen, Platz der GoettingerSieben 3, 37073 Goettingen,Germany, Phone: +49551/39-7328, Fax: +49551/39-5849,E-Mail: boztug@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de.Conducting Mediation Analysis in Marketing ResearchBy Carsten L. Demming, Steffen Jahn and Yasemin Boztu ̆gMarketing researchers frequently conductmediation analysis to enrich their understand-ing of a focal causal relationship by examin-ing its underlying mechanism. The main pur-pose of this review is to provide an overviewof what mediation analysis means, which ap-proaches exist to establish mediation, andhow to conduct mediation analysis with thestate-of-the-art methodology. In the first partof the paper we review conceptual consider-ations of mediation for the most commonlyused mediation model groups. We further dis-cuss the suitability of different mediation anal-ysis approaches, focusing on the bootstrap-ping approach. The second part of the paperis organized as a tutorial. Based on an exam-ple from the marketing field, we illustrate howto specify, estimate, and interpret mediationmodels with a tool for SPSS and SAS calledPROCESS (Hayes 2017). We recommend ahierarchical procedure in which simple media-tion models are examined first, followed bymore complex models.