Researchers have known for decades that the study of individuals is not the same as the study of families. However, combining self-report information from three or more family members to form a score that represents a family has presented conceptual and statistical problems. The purpose of this article is to present a strategy for deriving a measure of a family property that (1) is originally obtained from individuals, (2) is different from the sum of the family members scores, (3) is reflective of the unique contribution of each family member to the score that represents family, and (4) is as idiosyncratic to an individual family as an individual's score on a measure is to the individual.
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