Social Selection, Dyadic Covariates, and Geospatial Effects

Abstract

Individual, Dyadic, and Other Attributes In this chapter, we introduce models that include effects for actor attributes and dyadic covariates. Actor attributes are individual-level measures on the nodes of the network. Social selection models examine whether attribute-related processes affect network ties (e.g., homophily processes whereby network ties tend to occur between individuals with similar actor attributes) (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). A dyadic covariate, in contrast, is a measure on each dyad, that is, on a pair of actors, and may similarly affect the presence of a tie. For instance, in a study of a trust network within an organization, the formal organizational hierarch..