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How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods
BACKGROUND: Contact surveys and diaries have conventionally been used to measure contact networks in different settings for elucidating infectious disease transmission dynamics of respiratory infections. More recently, technological advances have permitted the use of wireless sensor devices, which c...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3984737/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24612900 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-136 |
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author | Smieszek, Timo Barclay, Victoria C Seeni, Indulaxmi Rainey, Jeanette J Gao, Hongjiang Uzicanin, Amra Salathé, Marcel |
author_facet | Smieszek, Timo Barclay, Victoria C Seeni, Indulaxmi Rainey, Jeanette J Gao, Hongjiang Uzicanin, Amra Salathé, Marcel |
author_sort | Smieszek, Timo |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Contact surveys and diaries have conventionally been used to measure contact networks in different settings for elucidating infectious disease transmission dynamics of respiratory infections. More recently, technological advances have permitted the use of wireless sensor devices, which can be worn by individuals interacting in a particular social context to record high resolution mixing patterns. To date, a direct comparison of these two different methods for collecting contact data has not been performed. METHODS: We studied the contact network at a United States high school in the spring of 2012. All school members (i.e., students, teachers, and other staff) were invited to wear wireless sensor devices for a single school day, and asked to remember and report the name and duration of all of their close proximity conversational contacts for that day in an online contact survey. We compared the two methods in terms of the resulting network densities, nodal degrees, and degree distributions. We also assessed the correspondence between the methods at the dyadic and individual levels. RESULTS: We found limited congruence in recorded contact data between the online contact survey and wireless sensors. In particular, there was only negligible correlation between the two methods for nodal degree, and the degree distribution differed substantially between both methods. We found that survey underreporting was a significant source of the difference between the two methods, and that this difference could be improved by excluding individuals who reported only a few contact partners. Additionally, survey reporting was more accurate for contacts of longer duration, and very inaccurate for contacts of shorter duration. Finally, female participants tended to report more accurately than male participants. CONCLUSIONS: Online contact surveys and wireless sensor devices collected incongruent network data from an identical setting. This finding suggests that these two methods cannot be used interchangeably for informing models of infectious disease dynamics. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3984737 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-39847372014-04-25 How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods Smieszek, Timo Barclay, Victoria C Seeni, Indulaxmi Rainey, Jeanette J Gao, Hongjiang Uzicanin, Amra Salathé, Marcel BMC Infect Dis Research Article BACKGROUND: Contact surveys and diaries have conventionally been used to measure contact networks in different settings for elucidating infectious disease transmission dynamics of respiratory infections. More recently, technological advances have permitted the use of wireless sensor devices, which can be worn by individuals interacting in a particular social context to record high resolution mixing patterns. To date, a direct comparison of these two different methods for collecting contact data has not been performed. METHODS: We studied the contact network at a United States high school in the spring of 2012. All school members (i.e., students, teachers, and other staff) were invited to wear wireless sensor devices for a single school day, and asked to remember and report the name and duration of all of their close proximity conversational contacts for that day in an online contact survey. We compared the two methods in terms of the resulting network densities, nodal degrees, and degree distributions. We also assessed the correspondence between the methods at the dyadic and individual levels. RESULTS: We found limited congruence in recorded contact data between the online contact survey and wireless sensors. In particular, there was only negligible correlation between the two methods for nodal degree, and the degree distribution differed substantially between both methods. We found that survey underreporting was a significant source of the difference between the two methods, and that this difference could be improved by excluding individuals who reported only a few contact partners. Additionally, survey reporting was more accurate for contacts of longer duration, and very inaccurate for contacts of shorter duration. Finally, female participants tended to report more accurately than male participants. CONCLUSIONS: Online contact surveys and wireless sensor devices collected incongruent network data from an identical setting. This finding suggests that these two methods cannot be used interchangeably for informing models of infectious disease dynamics. BioMed Central 2014-03-10 /pmc/articles/PMC3984737/ /pubmed/24612900 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-136 Text en Copyright © 2014 Smieszek et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Smieszek, Timo Barclay, Victoria C Seeni, Indulaxmi Rainey, Jeanette J Gao, Hongjiang Uzicanin, Amra Salathé, Marcel How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title | How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title_full | How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title_fullStr | How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title_full_unstemmed | How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title_short | How should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
title_sort | how should social mixing be measured: comparing web-based survey and sensor-based methods |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3984737/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24612900 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-136 |
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