Collecting close-contact social mixing data with contact diaries: reporting errors and biases

Burri, E. U.; Scherzinger, R.; Scholz, Roland

doi:10.1017/s0950268811001130

Cited by 69 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…For example, some shorter encounters may have been forgotten. [25] Some participants may have reported contacts for an atypical day, for instance they may have been sick during the assessment, but we were not able to make that distinction in our study. Our data were collected within a few months, and roughly during the same season.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

A Household-Based Study of Contact Networks Relevant for the Spread of Infectious Diseases in the Highlands of Peru

et al. 2015

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BackgroundFew studies have quantified social mixing in remote rural areas of developing countries, where the burden of infectious diseases is usually the highest. Understanding social mixing patterns in those settings is crucial to inform the implementation of strategies for disease prevention and control. We characterized contact and social mixing patterns in rural communities of the Peruvian highlands.Methods and FindingsThis cross-sectional study was nested in a large prospective household-based study of respiratory infections conducted in the province of San Marcos, Cajamarca-Peru. Members of study households were interviewed using a structured questionnaire of social contacts (conversation or physical interaction) experienced during the last 24 hours. We identified 9015 reported contacts from 588 study household members. The median age of respondents was 17 years (interquartile range [IQR] 4–34 years). The median number of reported contacts was 12 (IQR 8–20) whereas the median number of physical (i.e. skin-to-skin) contacts was 8.5 (IQR 5–14). Study participants had contacts mostly with people of similar age, and with their offspring or parents. The number of reported contacts was mainly determined by the participants’ age, household size and occupation. School-aged children had more contacts than other age groups. Within-household reciprocity of contacts reporting declined with household size (range 70%-100%). Ninety percent of household contact networks were complete, and furthermore, household members' contacts with non-household members showed significant overlap (range 33%-86%), indicating a high degree of contact clustering. A two-level mixing epidemic model was simulated to compare within-household mixing based on observed contact networks and within-household random mixing. No differences in the size or duration of the simulated epidemics were revealed.ConclusionThis study of rural low-density communities in the highlands of Peru suggests contact patterns are highly assortative. Study findings support the use of within-household homogenous mixing assumptions for epidemic modeling in this setting.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

A Household-Based Study of Contact Networks Relevant for the Spread of Infectious Diseases in the Highlands of Peru

et al. 2015

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“…So far, no studies have validated the accuracy of contact diaries against other, more objective measures of social mixing; studies which have considered reciprocal agreement in the reporting of contact properties between participants found reciprocity increased with duration and intimacy of contact [15,29]. …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social encounter networks: characterizing Great Britain

et al. 2013

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A major goal of infectious disease epidemiology is to understand and predict the spread of infections within human populations, with the intention of better informing decisions regarding control and intervention. However, the development of fully mechanistic models of transmission requires a quantitative understanding of social interactions and collective properties of social networks. We performed a cross-sectional study of the social contacts on given days for more than 5000 respondents in England, Scotland and Wales, through postal and online survey methods. The survey was designed to elicit detailed and previously unreported measures of the immediate social network of participants relevant to infection spread. Here, we describe individual-level contact patterns, focusing on the range of heterogeneity observed and discuss the correlations between contact patterns and other socio-demographic factors. We find that the distribution of the number of contacts approximates a power-law distribution, but postulate that total contact time (which has a shorter-tailed distribution) is more epidemiologically relevant. We observe that children, public-sector and healthcare workers have the highest number of total contact hours and are therefore most likely to catch and transmit infectious disease. Our study also quantifies the transitive connections made between an individual's contacts (or clustering); this is a key structural characteristic of social networks with important implications for disease transmission and control efficacy. Respondents' networks exhibit high levels of clustering, which varies across social settings and increases with duration, frequency of contact and distance from home. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for the transmission and control of pathogens spread through close contact.

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“…As the study is dependent on participation and parents observing and recording contacts (and the age of contacts) there is likely to be participation and observation/recall bias, especially those with a lot of short contacts who might have failed to remember these or the age of contacts [26].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Life of Infants in the Context of Infectious Disease Transmission; Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns of the Very Young

et al. 2013

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Insight into how humans interact helps further understanding of the transmission of infectious diseases. For diseases such as pertussis, infants are at particular risk for severe outcomes. To understand the contact pattern of infants, especially those too young to be vaccinated, we sent contact diaries to a representative sample of 1000 mothers in the United Kingdom. We received 115 responses with a total of 758 recorded contacts. The average number of daily contacts for an infant was 6.68 overall and 5.7 for those aged ≤10 weeks. Of the latter, 2.1 (37%) contacts were with non-household members and were >15 minutes duration, suggesting that a cocooning programme may miss a substantial proportion of exposures leading to disease transmission. The least contact was between adolescents and infants. Thus the impact of adolescent (pertussis) vaccination on infants would likely be limited, unless it reduces transmission to other age groups whose contact with infants is greater.

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Collecting close-contact social mixing data with contact diaries: reporting errors and biases

Cited by 69 publications

References 22 publications

A Household-Based Study of Contact Networks Relevant for the Spread of Infectious Diseases in the Highlands of Peru

A Household-Based Study of Contact Networks Relevant for the Spread of Infectious Diseases in the Highlands of Peru

Social encounter networks: characterizing Great Britain

The Social Life of Infants in the Context of Infectious Disease Transmission; Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns of the Very Young

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