Three essential analytical techniques for the behavioral marketing researcher: Median splits, mean-centering, and mediation analysis

For the behavioral marketing scholar, experimentation and the analysis of variance are among the most important and frequently relied upon tools of the trade, and many useful texts exist to guide researchers on these topics. This monograph is intended to be a supplemental resource and a helpful guide for conducting three essential analytical techniques that are also frequently useful to the behavioral researcher: (1) we discuss the practice of conducting a median split on a continuous variable to facilitate communication clarity. (2) We demonstrate the practice of centering variables about their means prior to creating product terms to reflect interaction effects in a moderated multiple regression model. (3) We discuss the practice of a mediation analysis to test for the relative impact of direct and indirect effects of predictors on dependent variables.