Expanding poststroke depression research: movement toward a dyadic perspective

Research on depression following stroke has traditionally been oriented toward understanding the experiences of individual survivors or their spousal caregivers outside of the context of their committed relationship. Moving toward a dyadic orientation to the problem of poststroke depression, in which the stroke survivor-spouse dyad is viewed as the primary unit of analysis, will open the door to new lines of inquiry and may eventually lead to more effective treatments for survivors and their spouses. The first half of this article discusses the rationale for moving poststroke depression research toward a more dyadic perspective and highlights current efforts in this area. The second half of this article discusses some methodological challenges associated with dyadic data and the practical benefits of one statistical methodology, multilevel modeling, for examining depression in survivor-stroke dyads.