Abstract
The exploration of people’s everyday life has long been of interest to social scientists. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by technology (e.g. mobile phones). To date, a few large-scale studies have been designed to measure human behaviors and interactions using multiple sources of data. A common characteristic of these studies is the population under investigation: students having similar daily routines and needs. This choice constraints the range of behaviors, of places and the generalization of the results. In order to widen this line of studies, we focus on a different target group: parents with young children aged 0 through 10 years. Children influence multiple aspects of their parents’ lives, from the satisfaction of basic human needs and the fulfillment of social roles to their financial status and sleep quality. In this paper, we describe the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) project, a longitudinal living lab which has been sensing by means of technology (mobile phones) the lives of more than 100 parents in different areas of the Trentino region in Northern Italy. We present the preliminary results after two years of experimentation of, to the best of our knowledge, the most complete picture of parents’ daily lives. Through the collection and analysis of the collected data, we created a multi-layered view of the participants’ lives, tracking social interactions, mobility routines, spending patterns, and personality characteristics. Overall, our results prove the relevance of living lab approaches to measure human behaviors and interactions, which can pave the way to new studies exploiting a richer number of behavioral indicators. Moreover, we believe that the proposed methodology and the collected data could be very valuable for researchers from different disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, computer science, economy, etc., which are interested in understanding human behaviour.
Highlights
The exploration of everyday life and mundane behaviors of people have long been of interest to social scientists [, ]
We describe the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) project, a longitudinal living lab which has been sensing by means of technology the lives of more than 100 parents in different areas of the Trentino region in Northern Italy
2 Methods: data collection we describe the recruitment process, the socio-demographic characteristics of our study participants, the data collection platform, the multiple sources of data we collected, and the personal data management tool provided to our study participants in order to control and share with each other the collected data
Summary
The exploration of everyday life and mundane behaviors of people have long been of interest to social scientists [ , ]. The Copenhagen Networks Study [ ] is collecting data on face-to-face interactions, mobile phone communications, Facebook usage, location, demographics and other individual characteristics for a population of almost students. We report initial results from the MTL project, primarily in the form of an overview of the collected data and of an initial analysis of the participants’ communication, mobility, spending behaviors and their interactions with personality traits and life satisfaction.
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