My training was in psychology, but that was in the days before mediation became the rage. By that time, I was working in the
area of health-related research & biostatistics. One thing I find interesting is that the definitions of confounding and mediation are nearly identical, the difference being that the mediator is on a presumed causal chain between X and Y. For some good discussion of this, see Mike Babyak's short article available here:
http://ebmh.bmj.com/content/12/3/68.full
Given this similarity between confounding and mediation, I find it very interesting that the standard advice in the world of biostatistics is (or at least was a few years ago) that one should NOT perform a statistical test for confounding, whereas the mediation folks are going whole hog down the road of testing (e.g., developing standard errors).
Here's an example of the biostats view from
Bob Wolfe's (from University of Michigan) "classic lecture" series. (Unfortunately, these lectures no longer seem to be available online. Fortunately, I saved copies of some of them.)
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C. Testing for confounding (don't do it):
When attempting to document the effect of a specific risk factor on an outcome, confounding factors should be controlled for even if they are not significantly related to the outcome in the analysis. In this case, the objective of the analysis is to estimate the strength of the relationship between the risk factor and the outcome not explainable by confounding factors, and the strength of the relationship between the confounding factors and the outcome is not as important.
When searching for a parsimonious model for predicting the outcome, it is useful to exclude unimportant factors from the model. Some data analysts use statistical significance as a criterion for importance. This approach may miss confounders.
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Finally, I should mention that the next section in that same lecture has the title, "D. Confounders and intervening variables: Often a quandary." Intervening variable is another name for mediator, of course.
Bruce Weaver Professor, Lakehead University Canada