Influence of Contact Definitions in Assessment of the Relative Importance of Social Settings in Disease Transmission Risk

Kirsty J Bolton, James M McCaw, Kristian Forbes, Paula Nathan, Garry Robins, Philippa Pattison, Terry Nolan and Jodie McVernon

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 2, 1-8

Abstract: Background: Realistic models of disease transmission incorporating complex population heterogeneities require input from quantitative population mixing studies. We use contact diaries to assess the relative importance of social settings in respiratory pathogen spread using three measures of person contact hours (PCH) as proxies for transmission risk with an aim to inform bipartite network models of respiratory pathogen transmission. Methods and Findings: Our survey examines the contact behaviour for a convenience sample of 65 adults, with each encounter classified as occurring in a work, retail, home, social, travel or “other” setting. The diary design allows for extraction of PCH-interaction (cumulative time in face-face conversational or touch interaction with contacts) – analogous to the contact measure used in several existing surveys – as well as PCH-setting (product of time spent in setting and number of people present) and PCH-reach (product of time spent in setting and number of people in close proximity). Heterogeneities in day-dependent distribution of risk across settings are analysed using partitioning and cluster analyses and compared between days and contact measures. Although home is typically the highest-risk setting when PCH measures isolate two-way interactions, its relative importance compared to social and work settings may reduce when adopting a more inclusive contact measure that considers the number and duration of potential exposure events. Conclusions: Heterogeneities in location-dependent contact behaviour as measured by contact diary studies depend on the adopted contact definition. We find that contact measures isolating face-face conversational or touch interactions suggest that contact in the home dominates, whereas more inclusive contact measures indicate that home and work settings may be of higher importance. In the absence of definitive knowledge of the contact required to facilitate transmission of various respiratory pathogens, it is important for surveys to consider alternative contact measures.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0030893 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 30893&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0030893

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030893

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().