ABSTRACT
How adolescents view one another plays a critical role in their interpersonal behaviors and relationships. This intuitive statement is supported by research on adults’ interpersonal perceptions (see Kenny, 1994) as well as related research on adolescents’ social cognitions (see Crick & Dodge, 1994; Gifford-Smith & Rabiner, 2004). However, empirical evaluation of this statement requires the use of specialized models, with the Social Relations Model (SRM) being an especially flexible model for studying interpersonal perceptions. In this chapter, we will first describe the SRM, focusing on the bivariate SRM. Our main goal of this chapter, however, is to show how the bivariate SRM can be used to study dyadic relationships in which some individuals are in multiple relationships. In our view, this situation is common when studying adolescent friendships, yet existing dyadic data analysis methods are limited. We illustrate how the bivariate SRM can be used to study interpersonal perceptions within early adolescent friendships, using data on sixth graders’ friendships and perceptions of aggression and prosocial behavior. We
conclude that the SRM, although typically considered an approach to studying small groups, can also be a useful tool for studying dyadic relationships, overcoming some difficulties inherent in other models.
