Multidimensional Human Dynamics in Mobile Phone Communications

Quadri, Christian; Zignani, Matteo; Capra, Lorenzo; Gaito, Sabrina; Rossi, Gian Paolo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0103183

Cited by 27 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The advent of newer channels of digital communication in the last decade has rapidly supplemented the usage of mobile phones. The pattern of communication availing multiple modes, for example, voice calling in conjunction with text-messaging or through social networking services, is in turn able to characterize the nature of sociality [32][33][34]. How-ever, the fact that variability in calls can also serve as an important factor, has been rather overlooked.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying gender preferences in human social interactions using a large cellphone dataset

et al. 2019

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In human relations individuals' gender and age play a key role in the structures and dynamics of their social arrangements. In order to analyze the gender preferences of individuals in interaction with others at different stages of their lives we study a large mobile phone dataset. To do this we consider four fundamental gender-related caller and callee combinations of human interactions, namely male to male, male to female, female to male, and female to female, which together with age, kinship, and different levels of friendship give rise to a wide scope of human sociality. Here we analyse the relative strength of these four types of interaction using call detail records. Our analysis suggests strong age dependence for an individual of one gender choosing to call an individual of either gender. We observe a strong bonding with the opposite gender across most of their reproductive age. However, older women show a strong tendency to connect to another female that is one generation younger in a way that is suggestive of the grandmothering effect. We also find that the relative strength among the four possible interactions depends on phone call duration. For calls of medium and long duration, opposite gender interactions are significantly more probable than same gender interactions during the reproductive years, suggesting potential emotional exchange between spouses. By measuring the fraction of calls to other generations we find that mothers tend to make calls more to their daughters than to their sons, whereas fathers make calls more to their sons than to their daughters. For younger callers, most of their calls go to the same generation contacts, while older people call the younger people more frequently, which supports the suggestion that affection flows downward. Our study primarily rests on resolving the nature of interactions by examining the durations of calls. In addition, we analyse the intensity of the observed effects using a score based on a null model.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying gender preferences in human social interactions using a large cellphone dataset

et al. 2019

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“…However, social relationships are shaped and maintained through a diversity of communication channels ( Vlahovic et al 2012 ; Reid and Reid 2005 ; Nanavati et al 2008 ; Wang et al 2013 ; Zignani et al 2014 ; Quadri et al 2014 ). People do not use these channels uniformly – rather, the choice of channel depends on many factors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multichannel social signatures and persistent features of ego networks

et al. 2018

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The structure of egocentric networks reflects the way people balance their need for strong, emotionally intense relationships and a diversity of weaker ties. Egocentric network structure can be quantified with ’social signatures’, which describe how people distribute their communication effort across the members (alters) of their personal networks. Social signatures based on call data have indicated that people mostly communicate with a few close alters; they also have persistent, distinct signatures. To examine if these results hold for other channels of communication, here we compare social signatures built from call and text message data, and develop a way of constructing mixed social signatures using both channels. We observe that all types of signatures display persistent individual differences that remain stable despite the turnover in individual alters. We also show that call, text, and mixed signatures resemble one another both at the population level and at the level of individuals. The consistency of social signatures across individuals for different channels of communication is surprising because the choice of channel appears to be alter-specific with no clear overall pattern, and ego networks constructed from calls and texts overlap only partially in terms of alters. These results demonstrate individuals vary in how they allocate their communication effort across their personal networks and this variation is persistent over time and across different channels of communication.

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“…On the other side, a great effort has been devoted to study the local properties of mobile phone graphs. Many researchers proposed measures to characterize the properties of the links: the burstiness level [6,7] and the link persistence [4] are often used to describe link dynamics, whereas the link overlap [3] captures the role of the link with respect to (w.r.t.) dense/sparse structures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calling, texting, and moving: multidimensional interactions of mobile phone users

Zignani

Quadri

Gaito

et al. 2015

Compu Social Networls

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The communication networks obtained by using mobile phone datasets have drawn increasing attention in recent years. Studies have led to important advances in understanding the behavior of mobile users although they have just considered text message (short message service (SMS)), call data, and spatial proximity, separately. However, there is a growing awareness that human sociality is expressed simultaneously on multiple layers, each corresponding to a specific way an individual has to communicate. In fact, besides the common real life encounters, a mobile phone user has at least two further communication media to exploit, SMSs and voice calls. This is advocating a multidimensional approach if we are seeking a compound description of the human mobile social behavior. In this context, we perform the first study of the multiplex mobile network, gathered from the records of both call and text message activities, along with relevant geographical information, of millions of users of a large mobile phone operator over a period of 12 weeks. By computing a set of complex network metrics, at different scales, onto the three single layers given by calls, SMSs and spatial proximity, and their extensions onto a three-level network, we provide a comprehensive study of the global multi-layered network which arises from both the overall on-the-phone communications performed by mobile users and their spatial propinquity.

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Multidimensional Human Dynamics in Mobile Phone Communications

Cited by 27 publications

References 29 publications

Quantifying gender preferences in human social interactions using a large cellphone dataset

Quantifying gender preferences in human social interactions using a large cellphone dataset

Multichannel social signatures and persistent features of ego networks

Calling, texting, and moving: multidimensional interactions of mobile phone users

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