ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018
Temporal variation of human encounters and the number of locations in which they occur: a longitudinal study of Hong Kong residents.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of Social Contact Surveys to Inform Transmission Models of Close-contact Infections.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2019Pooled it
- First- and second-order social contact network structure in southern China.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Social contact patterns and their impact on the transmission of respiratory pathogens in rural China.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Utilizing large language models in infectious disease transmission modelling for public health preparedness.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Effect of prior outbreak work experience to future outbreak responses for nurses in Hong Kong: A cross-sectional study.Collegian (Royal College of Nursing, Australia) · 2022Article
- Profiling vaccine believers and skeptics in nurses: A latent profile analysis.International journal of nursing studies · 2022Article
- Path to normality: Assessing the level of social-distancing measures relaxation against antibody-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants in a partially-vaccinated population.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2022Article
- Population Adherence to Infection Control Behaviors during Hong Kong's First and Third COVID-19 Waves: A Serial Cross-Sectional Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- The population attributable fraction of cases due to gatherings and groups with relevance to COVID-19 mitigation strategies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Psychobehavioral Responses and Likelihood of Receiving COVID-19 Vaccines during the Pandemic, Hong Kong.Emerging infectious diseases · 2021Article
- Social Contact Patterns and Implications for Infectious Disease Transmission: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Contact Surveys.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2021Article
- Evolving Epidemiological Characteristics of COVID-19 in Hong Kong From January to August 2020: Retrospective Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- The impact of COVID-19 and strategies for mitigation and suppression in low- and middle-income countries.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) cases in Hong Kong and implications for further spread.The Journal of infection · 2020Article
- Epidemiological characteristics of the first 53 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong, 13 February 2020.Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin · 2020Article
- Article
- Patterns of human social contact and contact with animals in Shanghai, China.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- What can urban mobility data reveal about the spatial distribution of infection in a single city?BMC public health · 2019Article
- Quantifying heterogeneous contact patterns in Japan: a social contact survey.Theoretical biology & medical modelling · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Patterns of social contact between individuals are important for the transmission of many pathogens and shaping patterns of immunity at the population scale. To refine our understanding of how human social behaviour may change over time, we conducted a longitudinal study of Hong Kong residents. We recorded the social contact patterns for 1450 individuals, up to four times each between May 2012 and September 2013. We found individuals made contact with an average of 12.5 people within 2.9 geographical locations, and spent an average estimated total duration of 9.1 h in contact with others during a day. Distributions of the number of contacts and locations in which contacts were made were not significantly different between study waves. Encounters were assortative by age, and the age mixing pattern was broadly consistent across study waves. Fitting regression models, we examined the association of contact rates (number of contacts, total duration of contact, number of locations) with covariates and calculated the inter- and intra-participant variation in contact rates. Participant age was significantly associated with the number of contacts made, the total duration of contact and the number of locations in which contact occurred, with children and parental-age adults having the highest rates of contact. The number of contacts and contact duration increased with the number of contact locations. Intra-individual variation in contact rate was consistently greater than inter-individual variation. Despite substantial individual-level variation, remarkable consistency was observed in contact mixing at the population scale. This suggests that aggregate measures of mixing behaviour derived from cross-sectional information may be appropriate for population-scale modelling purposes, and that if more detailed models of social interactions are required for improved public health modelling, further studies are needed to understand the social processes driving intra-individual variation.
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