Spatial patterns of close relationships across the lifespan

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale mobile phone data to analyze how close relationships influence migration patterns across different life stages, revealing age, sex, and emotional closeness effects on geographic proximity.

Contribution

It combines geographic, demographic, and communication data at scale to link relationship dynamics with migration, providing new insights into human social behavior over the lifespan.

Findings

Young couples tend to live farther apart than older couples.

Emotionally closer pairs are geographically nearer.

Relationship patterns are strongly linked to migration behaviors.

Abstract

The dynamics of close relationships is important for understanding the migration patterns of individual life-courses. The bottom-up approach to this subject by social scientists has been limited by sample size, while the more recent top-down approach using large-scale datasets suffers from a lack of detail about the human individuals. We incorporate the geographic and demographic information of millions of mobile phone users with their communication patterns to study the dynamics of close relationships and its effect in their life-course migration. We demonstrate how the close age- and sex-biased dyadic relationships are correlated with the geographic proximity of the pair of individuals, e.g., young couples tend to live further from each other than old couples. In addition, we find that emotionally closer pairs are living geographically closer to each other. These findings imply that the life-course framework is crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of close relationships and their effect on the migration patterns of human individuals.