THIS IS the first in a series of articles reporting on the research project, "Evaluation of Family Interaction Scales," a method, developed by the senior author, for studying whole family interaction. This paper reviews the theoretical framework and describes the research design and method. The second paper will present in some detail the research findings, and the last paper will discuss methodological aspects of the project as well as some of the implications of the findings for future research.

Psychiatric interest in the family has expanded tremendously in the last 15 years. This is evident both in the growth of the family-therapy field¹ and in the increased focus of developing methodologies for studying families independently of immediate treatment implications. Wynne and Singer, for example, have published several papers describing their methodology for relating the parental interaction to certain behavior patterns in the child.^{2 5} Mishler and Waxler⁶