Moderation with a dichotomous and a continous predictor

Moderation means that the causal association between two variables is itself influenced by a third variable. It is tested by analysing the interaction of the supposed predictor with the supposed moderator in their effects on the dependent variable. In this example, a dataset/dataframe called dat contains three variables, a continuous predictor called independentVariable, a dichotomous supposed moderator called dichotomousVariable, and a continuous dependent variable called dependentVariable.

SPSS

Analysing an interaction in SPSS first requires creating a new variable consisting of the product of the two interacting variables (also see the section on transformation). Here this will be called interactionTerm. Note that there is debate on whether the dichotomous predictor should be coded 0 and 1 or -0.5 and 0.5: this influences the interpretation of the resulting coefficients.

COMPUTE interactionTerm = dichotomousVariable * independentVariable.

The regression can then be conducted:

REGRESSION
  /DEPENDENT dependentVariable
  /METHOD ENTER independentVariable
                dichotomousVariable
                interactionTerm
  /STATISTICS COEF CI(95) R ANOVA.

To order a plot:

GRAPH
  /SCATTERPLOT=independentVariable WITH dependentVariable BY dichotomousVariable.

R

R creates the interaction term automatically:

regr(dependentVariable ~ independentVariable * dichotomousVariable,
     data=dat);

To also order a plot:

regr(dependentVariable ~ independentVariable * dichotomousVariable,
     data=dat, plot=TRUE);