Spatial patterns of close relationships across the lifespan.
The dynamics of close relationships is important for understanding the migration patterns of individual life-courses. The bottom-up approach to this subject by social scientists has been limited by sample size, while the more recent top-down approach using large-scale datasets suffers from a lack of detail about the human individuals. We incorporate the geographic and demographic information of millions of mobile phone users with their communication patterns to study the dynamics of close relationships and its effect in their life-course migration. We demonstrate how the close age- and sex-biased dyadic relationships are correlated with the geographic proximity of the pair of individuals, e.g., young couples tend to live further from each other than old couples. In addition, we find that emotionally closer pairs are living geographically closer to each other. These findings imply that the life-course framework is crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of close relationships and their effect on the migration patterns of human individuals.
1] BECS, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland [2] BK21plus Physics Division and Department of Physics, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.
Hang-Hyun
HH
Jo
BECS, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland.
Jari
J
Saramäki
1] BECS, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland [2] Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
Robin I M
RI
Dunbar
1] BECS, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland [2] Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK [3] CABDyN Complexity Centre, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP, UK [4] Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Kimmo
K
Kaski
D000367:Age Factors; D040421:Cell Phone; D003142:Communication; D005060:Europe; D005260:Female; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011157:Population Dynamics / Q000639:trends*; D012737:Sex Factors; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis