Multichannel social signatures and persistent features of ego networks

Abstract

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.

Who is dropped and why? Methodological and substantive accounts for network loss

“…This strategic approach is also consistent with a different, substantive, rather than methodological, interpretation for why the profiles of individuals' networks tend to remain stable even as membership in their networks "churns." The process is homeostatic: Individuals have distinct and stable preferences for networks -"signatures" is one term (Heydari, et al, 2018;Saramäki, et al, 2013) for thisand upon dropping or being dropped by alters, they form new ties so as to maintain the general character of their ego networks. "Continuity theory" in gerontology (Atchley, 1989;Badawy, et al, 2018;Cornwell, 2014) similarly stresses individuals' efforts to sustain or reconstruct familiar social connections.…”

Text and phone calls: user behaviour and dual-channel communication prediction

“…Hence, dual-channel i.e. text and calls, usage behaviour and prediction are not considered even though most users prefer text [10] for communication. A dual-channel prediction algorithm will output a short list of 7-10 alters along with the communication channel that an ego is likely to utilize at a given time t. This algorithm can then be used as a subroutine for an adaptive communication initialization interface as shown in Fig.…”

“…In contrast, small data is often structured, easy to access, and easy to manage. Hence, small data has been successfully used to solve problems surrounding individuals like impact of communication technologies on relationships [24,25], communication behaviour of smartphone users [10,[13][14][15], user-centric context aware models for prediction [26], and call prediction [2,11].…”

“…Studies investigated the existence of temporal patterns in human communication behaviour [11] and showed that each individual has a unique and persistent communication pattern that follows daily rhythms [27][28][29]. Furthermore, these social signatures are present in both calls [9,11] and text messages [10]. It also seems that these signatures persist over time, despite the major changes in the ego's social network due to relocation, etc.…”

“…It also seems that these signatures persist over time, despite the major changes in the ego's social network due to relocation, etc. [10]. Some studies also suggest that personality [30], age, gender [31], and friendship style [32] are some factors which impact an individual's social signatures.…”