Treating the dyad as the unit of analysis: A primer on three analytic approaches

This article reviews three analytic approaches for treating the dyad as the unit of analysis. These approaches are useful for the specific, but quite common, situation in which researchers have information from or about two members of a dyad. Three approaches are described: intraclass correlations as a measure of similarity repeated measures analysis of variance, and hierarchical linear modeling. All three approaches are used to analyze the same data taken from the first wave of a shortterm longitudinal study of 197 families with adolescent children.