9 Reasons For Including Moderator

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      1)    Acknowledgement of the Complexity of the Behaviour

  • The investigation of moderating variables acknowledges the complexity of behaviour, experience & relationship as each individual is not the same.
  • This focus on Individual vs. group effects is more commonly known as tendency for researcher to be either lumpers or splitters (Simpson, 1945)  
  • Lumpers seek to group individuals and focus on how persons are the same. Splitters, in contrast look for differences among groups

Situation:  

When researcher performs coding process (qualitative studies), lumper and split coding are there. When researcher performs an interview process, he or she gets overall interview manuscripts and read line by line as a whole. This is called lumper coding. 

Split coding means each line in the paragraph, researcher differentiates and extracts meaning out of it. Take an example when researcher makes a study in Malaysia, within peninsular - Selangor, Johor or Penang, all these locations we expect people with different behaviour e.g. dialect, perception and economic level. As such researcher can't expect same individual perception towards an issue when considering different location. Researcher need to expect amid complexity. 

Generally, a researcher for moderator need to understand group differences, in other words within a group (e.g. a total of 300 - 400 sample size) when researcher go in-depth looking at gender differences, urban or rural differences, employed or unemployed differences, married or unmarried differences, All these differences helping towards getting more explanation on the issue.


Example:

Technology Advancement leading towards Business Performance:



When researcher integrates all types of firm and make an analysis, researcher get around 40% predictability, but the question is that if researcher try to segregate and look for micro, small, medium or large enterprise respectively towards business performance, can he or she connect each of this firm to business performance? To find the exact truth is to segregate each of the firm to business performance. In most cases, Micro enterprises very less technology needed, they don’t use but the medium they have used it, so the truth is more connected to medium in comparison to small.


      2)     Manipulation Check 

  • If there is an additional experimental factor picked so that an observed relation is differentially observed across subgroups, then the intervention effect is a test of the intervention theory. In other words, Moderation analysis provides a way to whether intervention effect has similar effect across different group
       3)    Generalisability of Results

·     Moderation analysis provides a way to test whether an intervention has similar effects
    across sub-groups
·    To demonstrate that intervention effects are obtained for males and females if the program would be disseminated to a whole group containing males and females
·    Similarly, the consistency of an intervention effect across subgroups demonstrates important information about the generalisability of an intervention  
      4)    Specificity of Effect
·     Another factor to be considered in moderation is specificity of effect, in contrast to generalizability, it is important to identify group which has greater effect or no effect, male and female differences, which one has more effect or less effect, there is exactly the truth lies. This information will then be used for target group’s intervention. Tailoring of intervention possible.
      5)    Identification of iatrogenic effects in subgroups
·   Moderation analysis can be used to identify subgroups for which effects are counterproductive
·    It is possible that there will be subgroups for which the intervention causes more negative outcomes
·    Taking an example some policy implemented by the government or likewise, the purpose of the male and female may be varied, if researcher try to mix up, he or she will be getting moderate effect of the policy. Nevertheless, if he or she try to segregate these groups, for instance to look at how’s female policy looking upon or how the policy male looking upon, researcher can see a big different between 2 groups. Female may not accept this kind of policy at all. Problem happen was went there is mix up, it moved towards mix opinion. Then investigation will be having lack of intervention effect. 
6)    Measurement Improvement
·    Lack of a moderating variable effect may be due to poor measurement of the moderator variable
·    Many moderator variables have reasonably good reliability such as age, sex and ethnicity
·       But other measurement limitations such as risk-taking propensity or impulsivity.
7)    Investigation of lack of an intervention effect
·    If there are two groups that are affected by an intervention in opposite ways, the overall effect will be nonsignificant even if there is a statistically significant effect in both groups albeit opposite.
·     Without investigation of moderating variables, these types of effect would not be observable
·    In addition, before abandoning an intervention or area of research it is useful to investigate subgroups for any intervention effect
·      Of course, this type of exploratory must consider the possibility of multiplicity where by testing more effects will lead to findings effects by chance alone
      8)    Moderators as a test of theory
·    There are situations when intervention effects may be theoretically expected in one group and not another
·     For example, there may be different social tobacco intervention effects for boys versus girls because reasons for smoking may differ across sex
·    In this way, mediation and moderation may be combined if it is expected that a theoretical mediating process would be present in one group but not in another group
       9)    Practical Implications
·     If moderator effects are found, then decisions about intervention delivery may depend on this information
·      If intervention effect is positive at all levels of the moderator, then it is reasonable to deliver the whole program
·      If intervention effect is observed for one group and not another, it may be useful to deliver the program to the group where it had success and develop a new intervention for other groups


Sources from: Professor Dr. Dileep Workshop on Role of Theory, Moderation & Mediation on 3 August 2019. 

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