Comparar métodos

	Análisis de Mediación Causal (Efectos Directos e Indirectos Naturales)	Análisis de procesos condicionales (mediación moderada)	Modelado Lineal Jerárquico (HLM / Modelado Multinivel)
Campo	Inferencia causal	Inferencia causal	Estadística
Familia	Regression model	Regression model	Hypothesis test
Año de origen	2010	2018	1986
Autor original	Pearl (2001); general framework by Imai, Keele & Tingley (2010)	Andrew F. Hayes (PROCESS framework); Preacher, Rucker & Hayes (moderated mediation)	Raudenbush & Bryk (popularized); Goldstein (parallel development)
Tipo	Counterfactual causal decomposition	Regression-based conditional process model	Parametric nested-data regression
Fuente seminal	Pearl, J. (2001). Direct and Indirect Effects. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 411-420.	Hayes, A. F. (2018). Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press. ISBN: 978-1462534654	Raudenbush, S.W. & Bryk, A.S. (2002). Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods (2nd ed.). Sage. ISBN: 978-0761919049
Alias	natural direct effect, natural indirect effect, NDE / NIE decomposition, counterfactual mediation	moderated mediation, moderated mediation analysis, PROCESS model, Hayes PROCESS conditional process model	HLM, MLM, multilevel modeling, multilevel analysis
Relacionados	5	5	4
Resumen	Causal mediation analysis is a counterfactual framework that splits a treatment's total effect into a Natural Direct Effect (NDE) and a Natural Indirect Effect (NIE) that runs through a mediator. The modern general approach was formalised by Pearl (2001) and Imai, Keele and Tingley (2010), giving the decomposition a precise causal interpretation.	Conditional process analysis is Andrew F. Hayes's regression-based PROCESS framework (2018) that combines mediation and moderation in a single model, testing how an indirect effect changes across levels of a moderator. It quantifies conditional indirect and conditional direct effects and tests them with bootstrap confidence intervals.	Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), also known as Multilevel Modeling (MLM), is a parametric statistical method for analyzing nested or clustered data — for example students within classrooms, patients within hospitals, or employees within organizations. Formalized by Raudenbush and Bryk in their 2002 seminal text (building on work from the mid-1980s), HLM simultaneously estimates individual-level and group-level effects while correctly partitioning variance across levels.