A social network comprises both actors and the social connections among them. Such connections reflect the dependence among social actors, which is essential for individuals' mental health and social development. In this article, we propose a mediation model with a social network as a mediator to investigate the potential mediation role of a social network. In the model, the dependence among actors is accounted for by a few mutually orthogonal latent dimensions which form a social space. The individuals' positions in such a latent social space are directly involved in the mediation process between an independent and dependent variable. After showing that all the latent dimensions are equivalent in terms of their relationship to the social network and the meaning of each dimension is arbitrary, we propose to measure the whole mediation effect of a network. Although individuals' positions in the latent space are not unique, we rigorously articulate that the proposed network mediation effect is still well defined. We use a Bayesian estimation method to estimate the model and evaluate its performance through an extensive simulation study under representative conditions. The usefulness of the network mediation model is demonstrated through an application to a college friendship network.

中文翻译：

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社交网络中介分析：一种潜在空间方法

社交网络包括参与者和他们之间的社会联系。这种联系反映了社会行动者之间的依赖性，这对个人的心理健康和社会发展至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一个以社交网络为中介的中介模型，以研究社交网络的潜在中介作用。在该模型中，参与者之间的依赖性由形成社会空间的几个相互正交的潜在维度来解释。个体在这种潜在社会空间中的位置直接参与了自变量和因变量之间的中介过程。在证明所有潜在维度在它们与社交网络的关系方面都是等价的并且每个维度的含义是任意的之后，我们建议测量网络的整体中介效应。尽管个人在潜在空间中的位置不是唯一的，但我们严格地阐明，所提出的网络中介效应仍然是明确定义的。我们使用贝叶斯估计方法来估计模型并通过在代表性条件下的广泛模拟研究来评估其性能。通过对大学友谊网络的应用证明了网络中介模型的有用性。