A KEY theme running through competing views of family influences upon adolescent development is that of directionality, on two levels: influences within the flow of family interaction; and influences from family processes to individual adolescent development. In this paper our focus is upon the first level, intrafamilial sequences within families. More specifically, we study links between psychiatric impairment in adolescence and developmentally relevant parent-child and parent-parent sequences. This report extends a previous investigation (Hauser et al. 1984), which described our new family coding system and first correlational findings. We now study the flow of interactions within these families. Although there has been much recent empirical research in adolescent psychosocial development (e.g., Redmore and Loevinger 1979; Loevinger 1976; Adams and Fitch 1982; Hauser et al. 1984), one important area has received less attention--the relationship between developmentally relevant family processes and psychiatric disturbance during adolescence.