Estimates of Social Contact in a Middle School Based on Self-Report and Wireless Sensor Data

Details

• Alternative Title:
  PLoS One
• Personal Author:
  Leecaster, Molly ; Toth, Damon J. A. ; Pettey, Warren B. P. ; Rainey, Jeanette J. ; Gao, Hongjiang ; Uzicanin, Amra ; Samore, Matthew
• Description:
  Estimates of contact among children, used for infectious disease transmission models and understanding social patterns, historically rely on self-report logs. Recently, wireless sensor technology has enabled objective measurement of proximal contact and comparison of data from the two methods. These are mostly small-scale studies, and knowledge gaps remain in understanding contact and mixing patterns and also in the advantages and disadvantages of data collection methods. We collected contact data from a middle school, with 7th and 8th grades, for one day using self-report contact logs and wireless sensors. The data were linked for students with unique initials, gender, and grade within the school. This paper presents the results of a comparison of two approaches to characterize school contact networks, wireless proximity sensors and self-report logs. Accounting for incomplete capture and lack of participation, we estimate that "sensor-detectable", proximal contacts longer than 20 seconds during lunch and class-time occurred at 2 fold higher frequency than "self-reportable" talk/touch contacts. Overall, 55% of estimated talk-touch contacts were also sensor-detectable whereas only 15% of estimated sensor-detectable contacts were also talk-touch. Contacts detected by sensors and also in self-report logs had longer mean duration than contacts detected only by sensors (6.3 vs 2.4 minutes). During both lunch and class-time, sensor-detectable contacts demonstrated substantially less gender and grade assortativity than talk-touch contacts. Hallway contacts, which were ascertainable only by proximity sensors, were characterized by extremely high degree and short duration. We conclude that the use of wireless sensors and self-report logs provide complementary insight on in-school mixing patterns and contact frequency.
• Subjects:
  Child Contact Tracing Data Collection Female Humans Male Models, Theoretical Respiratory Tract Infections Schools Self Report Social Behavior Students Surveys And Questionnaires Time Factors Wireless Technology

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• Source:
  PLoS One. 11(4).
• Pubmed ID:
  27100090
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC4839567
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Volume:
  11
• Issue:
  4
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:26fda6232259290022e629c0f47dcdec78cab68f3d3d6de33a19f0009ef95a85
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/39217/cdc_39217_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.20 MB ]