A comparative study of contact frequencies among social network members in five countries

As face-to-face and ICT-mediated social interaction patterns are relevant to explain (social) travel behavior, the objective of this paper is to study comparatively the factors that influence social interaction frequency via different communication modes. The analysis is based on seven recent data collections on personal social networks from Canada, Chile, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan. A multilevel-multivariate mixed model that explicitly accounts for the hierarchical nature of the data is used to jointly analyze contact frequency patterns across all samples. We show the existence of very consistent associations across samples between individual and relational characteristics and social interactions such as age, network size, distance and emotional closeness. At the same time, for other characteristics such as gender and relationship type, among others, effect patterns were less clear, differences that might be explained by intrinsic contextual characteristics as well as methodological differences among studies.