A novel approach is adopted for determining the elastic and plastic strains of individual grains within a deformed polycrystalline aggregate. In this approach, termed "multisite modeling", the deformation of a grain does not merely depend on the grain lattice orientation. It is also significantly influenced by the interaction with one or several of the surrounding grains. The elastic-plastic constitutive law is integrated by identifying iteratively which dislocation slip systems are activated within the grains, and the local stress tensor is shown to be the solution of a linear equation set. Several micro-macro averaging schemes are considered for the distribution of the macroscopic load over the polycrystalline aggregate. These averaging schemes are tested by simulating the development of intergranular strains during uniaxial tension of MONEL-400 as well as commercial purity aluminium. Neutron diffraction measurements of the elastic lattice strains are used as a reference in order to discriminate between the various predictions. The results demonstrate the relevance of "multisite" grain interactions in f.c.c. polycrystals. © 2002 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.