Contact patterns among high school students

• Main Authors: Fournet, Julie, Barrat, Alain
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 18-09-2014
• Subjects: Computer Science - Social and Information Networks; Physics - Physics and Society
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1409.5318

PLoS ONE 9(9):e107878 (2014) Face-to-face contacts between individuals contribute to shape social networks
and play an important role in determining how infectious diseases can spread
within a population. It is thus important to obtain accurate and reliable
descriptions of human contact patterns occurring in various day-to-day life
contexts. Recent technological advances and the development of wearable sensors
able to sense proximity patterns have made it possible to gather data giving
access to time-varying contact networks of individuals in specific
environments. Here we present and analyze two such data sets describing with
high temporal resolution the contact patterns of students in a high school. We
define contact matrices describing the contact patterns between students of
different classes and show the importance of the class structure. We take
advantage of the fact that the two data sets were collected in the same setting
during several days in two successive years to perform a longitudinal analysis
on two very different timescales. We show the high stability of the contact
patterns across days and across years: the statistical distributions of numbers
and durations of contacts are the same in different periods, and we observe a
very high similarity of the contact matrices measured in different days or
different years. The rate of change of the contacts of each individual from one
day to the next is also similar in different years. We discuss the interest of
the present analysis and data sets for various fields, including in social
sciences in order to better understand and model human behavior and
interactions in different contexts, and in epidemiology in order to inform
models describing the spread of infectious diseases and design targeted
containment strategies.