A GENERAL PROCEDURE FOR THE ESTIMATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE

Dependencies among observations are of interest to psychologists for b oth methodological and substantive reasons. A general procedure is dev eloped that can be used to estimate dependencies among observations, g iven a set of a priori expectations about the structure of those depen dencies. The utility of this general procedure is illustrated for spec ific cases: the estimation of serial dependency in time-series data, o f dyadic and group interdependence in social psychology, and of reliab ility. The utility of the approach derives from its generality and fro m its ability to handle randomly missing data.