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Studying human behaviour has traditionally been challenging, time-consuming and costly. Therefore, anthropologists have usually confined their research to small scale studies in the lab, field work and paper questionnaires. Now mobile phone technologies have revolutionised this.
Social scientists are now able to study humanity both economically – and almost instantly – on an unprecedented scale. Data collected is able to show detailed information about how we commute, where we work and eat, even measuring our levels of affluence.
Scientists at Aalto University in Finland have combined the both modern and old approaches, and are gathering mobile phone data relating to when and where a group of young people contact each other. They then combine it with information from questionnaires in a fascinating study of the relationships young people have with each other. Their results offer a snap shot of human behaviour!
The study reveals how daily communiqués are remarkably linked to major life changes. Also they show in interesting detail the way in which people’s gender influences the resources they choose for communication.
The Finnish scientists recruited 24 individuals who agreed to share their phone data over an 18 month period, during which they also had to complete questionnaires about their relationships with their regular phone contacts. All costs of calls throughout the study were covered by the researchers. The group were all students about to finish high school. This therefore meant that each person experienced a major life change during the period of the study; allowing researchers to analysis of the effects that this disruption had on communication patterns.
Results showed more calls being made in the morning compared to the evening; and showed certain contacts were only called at the same time of the day. There was also a strong difference between genders. Young women had greater variation in call duration, with longer calls occurring in the evening. Typically, these long calls were to a ‘significant other’ not a family member.
This would indicate young women are dedicated to pursuing and investing time in their romantic relationships. Scientists concluded that these ‘lover’ calls appear reserved to the evening and suggest that the hours of darkness are for certain kinds of social interactions!
It seems that the young people were much less likely to call family members in the evenings. The relationship with family is deemed less fragile than with friends, therefore requiring less servicing, they say. In fact, the findings would indicate that the quality of a friendship deteriorates very rapidly in the absence of frequent contact.
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