An Introduction to Spatial Analysis in Social Science Research

For years researchers have recognized the need to consider environmental and contextual variables in the social and behavioral sciences. Multilevel models have grown in popularity in large part because they provide a means to explicitly model the influence of context on many individual level processes. However, in applications of these and other statistical models that incorporate context into the analysis, rarely is physical location or distance between entities considered. In this paper we discuss a variety of spatial analysis techniques and their applications in educational and psychological research. We provide examples with the SAS software package and other more specialized spatial analysis software.