Autologistic Actor Attribute Models

This chapter presents a class of cross-sectional network models that, rather than modeling network structure, allows us to understand how individual behavior may be constrained by position in a social network and by behavior of other actors in the network.

Abstract

So far, we focused on how a particular network structure may be a product of endogenous network processes (clustering, transitivity, popularity, etc.) and exogenous nodal and dyadic factors (gender, membership, geography, etc.). This chapter presents a class of cross-sectional network models that, rather than modeling network structure, allows us to understand how individual behavior may be constrained by position in a social network and by behavior of other actors in the network. For this purpose, we take network ties to be exogenous and model behaviors of the actors. We use the term "behavior" to refer to whatever nodal attribute we are interested in modeling, but this is understood to also cover, for example, attitudes and beliefs. The behavior is assumed to represent states and, at least in principle, may be liable to change, and possibly to change several times. However, the network ties are treated as exogenous and not changed by the attributes. In this chapter, we deal with binary attribute variables as measures of behavior, and if the variable is 1, we say that the actor displays the behavior, or that the behavior is present for that actor.