Hong, G. (2015). Causality in a social world: Moderation, mediation and spill-over. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (425 pages)
Table of Content
The author’s interview with Statistics Views about the publication of this book can be accessed online.
Hong wrote in the book, “Without disciplined reasoning, a causal inference would slip into the rut of a ‘casual inference’ as easily as making a typographical error.” The book clarifies for applied researchers the theoretical concepts of moderated effects, mediated effects, and spill-over effects. It systematically introduces innovative statistical strategies for investigating these causal effects and aims to make them readily accessible to a broad audience. A major emphasis is placed on explicating and evaluating, in the context of real applications drawn from social sciences, education, and health research, the assumptions required for relating causal parameters of interest to empirical data given a specific research design.
The book is accompanied by data examples and statistical programs for the new causal inference methods. Analysis with both marginal mean weighting through stratification (MMWS) and ratio-of-mediator-probability weighting (RMPW) can be conducted in SPSS, Stata, SAS, and R. This web site provides the SPSS, Stata, SAS, and R code that the author and her colleagues have previously used in workshops and graduate courses. Moreover, the author has developed and will keep updating stand-alone MMWS and RMPW software programs. The program interfaces are designed not only to greatly ease computation but also to assist the applied user with analytic decision-making. All these materials are available online free of charge.