How does socioeconomic status influence social relations? A perspective from mobile phone data

Xi Wang, Tao Pei, Ci Song, Jie Chen, Hua Shu, Yaxi Liu, Sihui Guo and Xiao Chen

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2023, vol. 615, issue C

Abstract: Socioeconomic status (SES) and social relations are two important aspects of human social life. Does socioeconomic status influence social relations? If some relationship exists, it will help us understand various social issues such as economic mobility, social segregation, and disparity in health outcomes. Despite long-term efforts, our knowledge about how SES influences the strength and types of social relations is still limited. In this study, we used a large mobile phone dataset in Beijing, China, to study the relationship between SES and the strength and types of social relations at an urban population level. Specifically, we divided the social relations into three types based on users’ spatiotemporal mobility similarity: (1) family members with high similarity on weekday nights and weekends; (2) coworkers with high similarity on weekdays during the daytime; (3) friends with low similarity all the time. An individual’s SES was represented by the housing price in the home location. The results showed that people of higher SES (living in areas with higher housing prices) tend to interact less with others and allocate more time with friends but less time with family and coworkers than people of lower SES. Besides, people of higher SES split their time more unevenly to different social relationships. These findings shed light on solutions related to SES and inequality. For example, people of low SES could learn to expand their social circles by connecting with people who are different from their daily environment, which may bring upward social mobility and improve their well-being.

Keywords: Computational social science; Mobile phone data; Social network analysis; Socioeconomic status; Human mobility pattern (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843712300167X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:615:y:2023:i:c:s037843712300167x

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2023.128612

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().