Social relations between social actors, such as people, companies and countries, and the attributes (behavior, opinion, etc.) of these actors are not static: they evolve interdependently over time. People may befriend others with similar political opinions or change their own opinion based on those of their friends. The further is an example of social selection, a process where actors change their relations based on the attributes of other actors. The latter is an example of social influence, a process where the behavior of actors is affected by the actors with whom they have a certain relation. The stochastic actor-oriented model has been developed to statistically analyze this type of dynamics, based on repeated measures of networks and actor attributes.

In the original definition of the model, it is assumed that actor attributes are measured on an ordinal categorical scale. As a consequence, multiple researchers had to discretize their continuous actor variables to fit them in the modeling framework. Discretization leads to a loss of information. Therefore, we have extended the stochastic actor-oriented model for continuous actor attributes. This new model is widely applicable, as in health, educational and organizational sociology, where one is interested in the effects of social networks on individual behavior, many actor attributes are measured on a continuous scale.