How does socioeconomic status influence social relations? A perspective from mobile phone data

Does socioeconomic status influence social relations? If some relationship exists, it will help us understand various social issues such as economic mobility, social segregation, and disparity in health outcomes.

Despite long-term efforts, our knowledge about how SES influences the strength and types of social relations is still limited. In this study, we used a large mobile phone dataset in Beijing, China, to study the relationship between SES and the strength and types of social relations at an urban population level. Specifically, we divided the social relations into three types based on users' spatiotemporal mobility similarity: (1) family members with high similarity on weekday nights and weekends; (2) coworkers with high similarity on weekdays during the daytime; (3) friends with low similarity all the time.