ABSTRACT
I thank Drs. Stattin and Kerr for their scholarly critique. They are right: my thinking about the meaning of dyads, and various levels of analysis, needs to be clarified-in my own mind, as well as in my paper for this volume. First let me say that there was nothing in my paper that was meant to imply that we should no longer study the ways in which the actions and traits of each partner affect the kind of relationship that will develop in a parent-child pair. On the contrary. And of course, I do not (and did not in my paper) argue that there is anything wrong with studying the everyday interactions between parents and children. Such interactions provide the basic data from which we can identify the influence of each person (as actor and reactor, or agent and partner) on each other, but also the emergent properties of the relationship between the pair. In the work of Coie et al. (1999) and Cook (2001), for example, there is no thought of “abandoning the investigation of parent-child interaction on the subordinate level” (Stattin & Kerr, this volume) in order to “move over to the dyadic level”. No “moving over” is involved. Instead, the role of each partner and that of their relationships are examined simultaneously. And the nature of the relationship will have a subsequent impact, at the individual level, on each person involved in it. Thus, the individual and dyadic levels are closely intertwined. Both dyadic and individual measures can be used as either antecedents or outcomes, and each can be examined without sacrificing the other. But I and others are claiming there is something to be gained by considering the nature of the relationships themselves, over and above the characteristics of the individuals who enter into them. Indeed, we claim that the relationships level has been neglected in favor of almost exclusive focus on the individual.
