Spatial patterns of close relationships across the lifespan

Abstract

The dynamics of close relationships is important for understanding the migration patterns of individual life-courses. The bottom-up approach to this subject by social scientists has been limited by sample size, while the more recent top-down approach using large-scale datasets suffers from a lack of detail about the human individuals. We incorporate the geographic and demographic information of millions of mobile phone users with their communication patterns to study the dynamics of close relationships and its effect in their life-course migration. We demonstrate how the close age- and sex-biased dyadic relationships are correlated with the geographic proximity of the pair of individuals, e.g., young couples tend to live further from each other than old couples. In addition, we find that emotionally closer pairs are living geographically closer to each other. These findings imply that the life-course framework is crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of close relationships and their effect on the migration patterns of human individuals.

arXiv comment9 pages, 7 figures

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• Communication with family and friends across the life course
• Are the different layers of a social network conveying the same information?
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• Stylized facts in social networks: Community-based static modeling
• Different patterns of social closeness observed in mobile phone communication
• A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis
• Correlation between social proximity and mobility similarity
• From Symbols to Embeddings: A Tale of Two Representations in Computational Social Science
• Proximity in face-to-face interaction is associated with mobile phone communication
• Homophilic organization of egocentric communities in ICT services