Kin Networks Workshop

October 6th-10th, 2016
Oxford, UK

Although the social aspects of how we use our social environment through our life course has been studied by both biological (evolutionary life history theory) and social (life course studies) sciences, the question of how humans engineer the social network around them, with varying focus through their lives, is a relatively recent addition to the literature. The reason is to some extent methodological: to answer this question we need to have access to data of scientifically meaningful sample of dyadic relationships between individuals and their close social environment. Up until very recently, the identification of the kind of dyadic relationship that people have has been a challenge, despite the fact that large network databases, especially of digital communication, have been available. As a consequence, more studies have focused on aggregated, general type of relationships, for instance the gender of the most frequent interaction, rather than the detailed identification of the exact type of relationship.

However, recent literature has identified the possibility of detecting relationship types from mobile communication patterns. In a recent study David-Barrett et al. have introduced a new methodology of identifying the relationships, based on a combination of phone call patterns and meta data of the callers (age and gender).

The focus of this workshop is on exploring possible uses of anonymized telecom data to study kinship networks and population behaviour.

Special thanks to Pablo García for preparing the sample anonymized data that was used during the workshop.