Round-Robin Design

The round-robin design is a data-collection structure for dyadic research in which every member of a group interacts with, or provides ratings of, every other member, generating the full set of directed pairwise observations. Because each person serves repeatedly as both perceiver and target, the design produces the crossed data structure required to apply the Social Relations Model and to separate perceiver, target, and relationship effects. Round-robin designs are used to study interpersonal perception, attraction, behavior, and reciprocity in groups, families, and teams, and variants such as the block design (members of one set rate members of another) and half-block designs adapt the logic to different settings. The round-robin design is thus the data-gathering counterpart to the analytic models of dyadic data, and the quality of its structure determines what interpersonal questions can be answered.