Marital interaction in depression: a comparison of structural analysis of social behavior and the Kategoriensystem für Partnerschaftliche Interaktion.

Background: A number of studies have shown that marital interaction plays an important role regarding etiology, maintenance, and course of depression. The Kategoriensystem fur Partnerschaftliche Interaktion (KPI; 'Coding System for Marital/Family Interaction') and the Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) are both widely used to describe and quantify the interactional behavior of patients and their relatives. To evaluate the validity of extrapolating research findings from one system to another, especially in the field of depressive disorders, the two coding systems were compared in an empirical analysis.

Sampling And Methods: Videotaped marital problem-solving interaction tasks of 29 married couples with a depressed spouse were coded by means of both systems by separate teams of observers.

Results: Between-system comparisons revealed that convergent validity on the level of SASB clusters and KPI verbal categories were moderate and differentiated between the behavior of patients and that of spouses. The KPI nonverbal positive and negative categories were not simply correlated with the SASB affiliation dimension.

Conclusion: The results underline the importance of undertaking validation studies with different samples.