Modeling the Interdependence Among Family Members

Abstract

This article presents two methodological techniques that are particularly well suited to the study of family communication when data from multiple family members are gathered. Many continue to analyze family data using less than optimal data analytic approaches, thus limiting the ability of these results to reveal new insights into the family communication process. The purpose of this article is to describe the Social Relations Model (Kashy & Kenny, 1990) and the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (Kashy & Kenny, 2000), and to explain their utility in exploring dyadic and family data specifically in the area of family communication. The article provides detailed descriptions of the components of these models and how the parameters of these models can be estimated using two widely used statistical packages, LISREL (Jorskog & Sorbom, 2001) and PROC MIXED in SAS. Two detailed examples are given, each with an artificial data set that is included in this article.