Network Autocorrelation: a Simulation Study of a Foundational Problem in Regression and Survey

It is axiomatic to the social sciences, and an essential part of the network perspective, that human performances are intricately linked with their social and enviromental contexts. Researchers in each of the disciplines have rediscovered this in the past decade with respect to a whole host of specific problem areas, under such labels as “context effects”, “index utility”. and “systems analysis”. The earliest mention of the problem with respect to quantitative research occured, to our knowledge, in the debate between the nineteenth century cultural diffusionists and the evolutionists. The latter regarded individual societies as independent instances of uniform causation, and hoped to learn about causation from correlational studies. The former regarded their observations as embedded in an interactive network of historical relationships such as diffusion, migration, conquest, and competition, where the historical, evolutionary and ecological context of each society and the network of interconnectedness between societies plays a major role in multiple causation. In this view, events cannot be regarded as