Analyzing Sequential Categorical Data on Dyadic Interaction: A Comment on Gottman

Department of Human Developmentand Family Studies, Cornell UniversityRecent theoretical developments emphasize that social interactions are dynamicand reciprocal, and this has led to widespread use of time-series data on behaviorin two-person systems. In principle, such data allow one to separate the influencesof two actors on each other, Statistical methods currently being used, however,are deficient in several respects. In this article, we show that a statistic proposedby Sackett and later "proved" by Gottman is incorrect. We also show that thefailure to control for autodependence can produce misleading results. Finally,we introduce new procedures that are based on both traditional and more recentlydeveloped methods for the analysis of contingency tables. Using these procedures,we show how to test for dependency, how to measure dependency, how to testfor differences in dependency across subgroups, and how to test for dominancein reciprocal behavior sequences.