Posttreatment confounding in causal mediation studies: A cutting-edge problem and a novel solution via sensitivity analysis

Abstract

In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into indirect and direct effects, examples of posttreatment confounding are abundant. In the presence of treatment-by-mediator interactions, past research has generally considered it infeasible to adjust for a posttreatment confounder of the mediator–outcome relationship due to incomplete information: for any given individual, a posttreatment confounder is observed under the actual treatment condition while missing under the counterfactual treatment condition. This paper proposes a new sensitivity analysis strategy for handling posttreatment confounding and incorporates it into weighting-based causal mediation analysis. The key is to obtain the conditional distribution of the posttreatment confounder under the counterfactual treatment as a function of not only pretreatment covariates but also its counterpart under the actual treatment. The sensitivity analysis then generates a bound for the natural indirect effect and that for the natural direct effect over a plausible range of the conditional correlation between the posttreatment confounder under the actual and that under the counterfactual conditions. Implemented through either imputation or integration, the strategy is suitable for binary as well as continuous measures of posttreatment confounders. Simulation results demonstrate major strengths and potential limitations of this new solution. A reanalysis of the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) Riverside data reveals that the initial analytic results are sensitive to omitted posttreatment confounding.