  Dyadic research designs concern data that comprises interactions among
actors. Dyadic approaches unambiguously constitute the most frequent designs
employed in the empirical study of international politics, but what do such
designs cary with them in terms of theoretical claims and statistical problems?
These two issues are closely intertwined. When testing hypotheses empirically,
the statistical model must be a careful operationalization of the theory being
tested. Given that the theoretical and statistical cannot be separated, we
discuss dyadic research designs from these two perspectives; highlighting model
misspecification, erroneous assumptions about independence of events,
artificial levels of analysis, and the incoherent treatment of
multilateral/multiparty events on the theoretical side and difficult-to-escape
challenges to valid inference on the statistical side.
