Estimates of Social Contact in a Middle School Based on Self-Report and Wireless Sensor Data

Abstract

Estimates of contact among children, used for infectious disease transmission models and understanding social patterns, historically rely on self-report logs. Recently, wireless sensor technology has enabled objective measurement of proximal contact and comparison of data from the two methods. These are mostly small-scale studies, and knowledge gaps remain in understanding contact and mixing patterns and also in the advantages and disadvantages of data collection methods. We collected contact data from a middle school, with 7th and 8th grades, for one day using self-report contact logs and wireless sensors. The data were linked for students with unique initials, gender, and grade within the school. This paper presents the results of a comparison of two approaches to characterize school contact networks, wireless proximity sensors and self-report logs. Accounting for incomplete capture and lack of participation, we estimate that “sensor-detectable”, proximal contacts longer than 20 seconds during lunch and class-time occurred at 2 fold higher frequency than “self-reportable” talk/touch contacts. Overall, 55% of estimated talk-touch contacts were also sensor-detectable whereas only 15% of estimated sensor-detectable contacts were also talk-touch. Contacts detected by sensors and also in self-report logs had longer mean duration than contacts detected only by sensors (6.3 vs 2.4 minutes). During both lunch and class-time, sensor-detectable contacts demonstrated substantially less gender and grade assortativity than talk-touch contacts. Hallway contacts, which were ascertainable only by proximity sensors, were characterized by extremely high degree and short duration. We conclude that the use of wireless sensors and self-report logs provide complementary insight on in-school mixing patterns and contact frequency.

A systematic review of social contact surveys to inform transmission models of close contact infections

“…Each data collection tool has its own advantages and disadvantages 22 . For example, the use of paper or online contact diary is inaccurate for recording contacts of short duration, which are often forgotten by respondents 16,47,54,57 . On the other hand, proximity sensor devices can address this problem quite well.…”

“…In addition, this device may be difficult for those who are not familiar with the use of electronic devices. To date, comparison of the social mixing behavior captured by these data collection tools was only conducted in convenience surveys with small sample sizes 16,47,48,54,57 .…”

“…The use of these methods along with their advantages and disadvantages have been summarized elsewhere 5,63 . Third, to the best of our knowledge, our search query omitted the relevant articles of Leecaster et al 57 and Kwok et al 71 , which are eligible for this review. These articles are missing the survey/questionnaire/diary word in the abstract and title and therefore elude our searching method.…”

“…Approximately half (44%) of the surveys employed convenience sampling, in which subjects were selected based on of their convenient accessibility and proximity to researchers 56 . This sampling technique was also used for the sake of comparing data collection tools 16,47,48,54,57 , data collection methods 58 or study designs 8,15,48 .…”

Are the different layers of a social network conveying the same information?

“…These data have been widely used to investigate the structure of social networks, the patterns of social interactions and social theories, such as the strength of weak ties [7], homophily patterns (the tendency of individuals to have social links with similar individuals, with respect to gender, nationality, social class, etc.[10]) [11][12][13][14][15][16], mechanisms of link formation and persistence [11,12,17], social strategies linked to limited attention capacity [8], etc.In most cases, such studies are based on data describing one specific layer of the multilayer network characterizing social interactions, and consider this layer as a proxy of "the" social network of the population under study. Several research groups have, however, managed in recent years to access simultaneously more than one layer of interactions in various population groups, showing in each case that these layers are correlated but not equivalent [4,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. For instance, a comparison between face-to-face contacts measured by sensors and friendship relations obtained through surveys has shown that the distribution of contact durations are broad both for pairs of friends and pairs of non-friends, even if the longest contacts occur between friends [20].…”