Serial Mediation in R - how to setup the model?

Question

The well-known PROCESSr package unfortunately does not support serial mediation in r, as shown by the model below. I have been looking all over the net, but couldn't find a package that would allow me to specify the below model in r.

How would you go about setting up a model like this one in r? Is there a package to do so?

Answer 1

This should probably be migrated to StackOverflow since it is about software, but:

You could do this in the R package lavaan. In your model, you would first specify models for M1, M2, and Y. We will want to label all the paths, as well. I will label c' as cp, for "c-prime":

M1 ~ a1 * X
M2 ~ a2 * X + d21 * M1
Y ~  cp * X + b1  * M1 + b2 * M2

The indirect effect, ind_eff is then defined, per Hayes, as a1 * d21 * b2:

ind_eff := a1 * d21 * b2

You need to put this all in a string object:

model <- "
  M1 ~ a1 * X
  M2 ~ a2 * X + d21 * M1
  Y ~  cp * X + b1  * M1 + b2 * M2
  ind_eff := a1 * d21 * b2
"

Then you just run the model using bootstrapped confidence intervals to get the confidence interval for the indirect effect (ind_eff):

fit <- lavaan::sem(model = model, data = dat, se = "boot", bootstrap = 5000)

Where dat is the name of your data frame and 5000 is the number of bootstrap resamples you would like to do (this will likely take a few minutes).

To look at your results, you can call:

lavaan::parameterEstimates(fit, boot.ci.type = "bca.simple")