I find myself in general agreement with Pasley with respect to desired directions for stepfamily research and certainly concur that future studies need to (1) move beyond simple "deficit comparison" designs, (2) be more sensitive to variations in stepfamilies by assessing subgroup differences, and (3) use multiple measures from multiple sources. Although our study has limitations in all three areas, we believe that at this early stage in our understanding of how now-adult children perceive the quality of their parent-child relationships in stepfamilies, studies such as ours provide some initial information from which later studies can build. For the remainder of my response, I will refer to each of the three areas cited above.
