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. 2022 Mar 29;22:605. doi: 10.1186/s12889-022-13062-7

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — The mediation model with multicategorical independent variable(X: independent variable; Y: dependent variable; M: mediation variable; a_i: the relative effects of the other k-1 levels, respectively, relative to the k level, on mediation variable; b: the association between mediation variable and dependent variable after controlling for covariates; c_i: relative total effect of the k-1 levels, respectively, relative to the k level, on dependent variable after controlling for covariates; c’_i: relative direct effects of the k-1 levels, respectively, relative to the k level, on dependent variable after controlling for mediation variable and covariates