Peers are of great importance for children and adolescents (and, for that matter, adults). The social networks in which they are embedded may have important influences on well-being, health, and performance of students. Longitudinal data about networks and individual behavior, attitudes, performance, can be exploited to study influence processes. The Stochastic Actor-oriented Model (‘SAOM’) is a statistical model that can be used to analyze panel data of networks and individual attributes and outcomes. It is implemented in the statistical package RSiena available in the R system. 
This presentation will give an introductory description of the SAOM. The introduction may be called “half-technical”; “half” because to understand it the mathematical background cannot be totally ignored, but an intuitive understanding of the principles is enough. Some applications to educational situations will be reviewed. This includes studies of the relations between social networks and choice of activities by students, such as choices between academic subjects, or choices between various sport activities. Finally, some limitations (e.g., the difficulty of the network boundary specification) and open problems (e.g., the derivation of measures for effect size) are mentioned.