Does Your Smartphone “Know” Your Social Life? A Methodological Comparison of Day Reconstruction, Experience Sampling, and Mobile Sensing

Abstract

Mobile sensing is a promising method that allows researchers to directly observe human social behavior in daily life using people’s mobile phones. To date, limited knowledge exists on how well mobile sensing can assess the quantity and quality of social interactions. We therefore examined the agreement among experience sampling, day reconstruction, and mobile sensing in the assessment of multiple aspects of daily social interactions (i.e., face-to-face interactions, calls, and text messages) and the possible unique access to social interactions that each method has. Over 2 days, 320 smartphone users (51% female, age range = 18–80, M = 39.53 years) answered up to 20 experience-sampling questionnaires about their social behavior and reconstructed their days in a daily diary. Meanwhile, face-to-face and smartphone-mediated social interactions were assessed with mobile sensing. The results showed some agreement between measurements of face-to-face interactions and high agreement between measurements of smartphone-mediated interactions. Still, a large number of social interactions were captured by only one of the methods, and the quality of social interactions is still difficult to capture with mobile sensing. We discuss limitations and the unique benefits of day reconstruction, experience sampling, and mobile sensing for assessing social behavior in daily life.

Persons in contexts: The role of social networks and social density for the dynamic regulation of face-to-face interactions in daily life.

“…Alternatively, activity spaces may provide the option to restrict social networks to those people who live in reasonable proximity using objective criteria, addressing some limitations of self-reported social networks. Still, we believe such approaches unfold their full potential only when integrated with psychological insights obtained through (repeatedly) questioning people (Roos et al, 2023; Wrzus & Mehl, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, uncertainty about the exact timing of the underlying processes poses challenges for determining the optimal spacing for questionnaire measurements. On the other hand, focusing on conversation behavior, which—to a certain degree—can be measured continuously and objectively with sensors, poses technical challenges and might miss meaningful social interactions without (constant) conversation (Roos et al, 2023). Another debate revolves around the amount of social interaction necessary to be considered meaningful.…”

“…Multiple studies have demonstrated the validity of the AWARE-Conversations plug-in and found high accuracies of more than 85% correct classification using hip-worn audio sampling devices (Lane et al, 2011;Rabbi et al, 2011). Although the accuracy in the field using participants' smartphones is probably lower, the proportion of conversation measures showed substantial agreement with other assessments of face-to-face interactions (Roos et al, 2023).…”

“…Third, the measurement of social interactions still poses challenges to researchers in general and also in this study (Harari et al, 2016;Roos et al, 2023). On the one hand, questionnaire methods currently often lack a precise definition of social interaction because only brief explanations are provided and certain interactions such as working together silently might not be specified.…”

A Template and Tutorial for Preregistering Studies Using Passive Smartphone Measures

“…Often these assumptions are left implicit, making it difficult to build on prior research (Langener et al, 2023). In addition, it is often unclear which data should be used as ground truth, making validation studies challenging (Roos et al, 2023).…”