Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement

TL;DR

This study explores the link between social capital and synchronization in mobile communication patterns, showing that synchronization correlates with social capital metrics and can characterize community roles effectively.

Contribution

It introduces a synchronization-based approach to measure social capital using mobile communication data, offering a cost-effective way to analyze large territories.

Findings

Synchronization correlates with social capital metrics like referendum turnout and blood donations.

High synchronization within close communities differs from synchronization among different communities.

The approach enables timely analysis of social capital over large areas.

Abstract

Social capital has been studied in economics, sociology and political science as one of the key elements that promote the development of modern societies. It can be defined as the source of capital that facilitates cooperation through shared social norms. In this work, we investigate whether and to what extent synchronization aspects of mobile communication patterns are associated with social capital metrics. Interestingly, our results show that our synchronization-based approach well correlates with existing social capital metrics (i.e., Referendum turnout, Blood donations, and Association density), being also able to characterize the different role played by high synchronization within a close proximity-based community and high synchronization among different communities. Hence, the proposed approach can provide timely, effective analysis at a limited cost over a large territory.