Family research uses an increasing storehouse of multivariate methods. A major stream in these developments involves the analysis of covariance structures (ACS). ACS subsumes a variety of seemingly distinct procedures including exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, measurement models, path analysis, regression analysis, some panel designs, multiple population comparisons, and structural equation modeling. During the 1980s, family scholars learned that multiple regression is only a special case of ACS.¹ The 1990s should see a rapid increase in the use of ACS across a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.