Different patterns of social closeness observed in mobile phone communication

Abstract

We analyze a large-scale mobile phone call dataset containing information on the age, gender, and billing locality of users to get insight into social closeness in pairs of individuals of similar age. We show that in addition to using the demographic information, the ranking of contacts by their call frequency in egocentric networks is crucial to characterize the different communication patterns. We find that mutually top-ranked opposite-gender pairs show the highest levels of call frequency and daily regularity, which is consistent with the behavior of real-life romantic partners. At somewhat lower level of call frequency and daily regularity come the mutually top-ranked same-gender pairs, while the lowest call frequency and daily regularity are observed for mutually non-top-ranked pairs. We have also observed that older pairs tend to call less frequently and less regularly than younger pairs, while the average call durations exhibit a more complex dependence on age. We expect that a more detailed analysis can help us better characterize the nature of relationships between pairs of individuals and distinguish between various types of relations, such as siblings, friends, and romantic partners.

arXiv comment17 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Journal of Computational Social Science (published online, 2019)

References in corpus (14)

• Fast unfolding of communities in large networks
• Cooperative Game Theory Approaches for Network Partitioning
• Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks
• Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
• High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID
• Small But Slow World: How Network Topology and Burstiness Slow Down Spreading
• Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes
• Measuring large-scale social networks with high resolution
• The persistence of social signatures in human communication
• Friendship networks and social status
• Sex differences in intimate relationships
• Communication with family and friends across the life course
• Spatial patterns of close relationships across the lifespan
• Spatiotemporal correlations of handset-based service usages

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Internal migration and mobile communication patterns among pairs with strong ties
• Link-centric analysis of variation by demographics in mobile phone communication patterns