Investigating daily temporal patterns of social media usage by cellphone log

Abstract

Mobile phone not only becomes an important extended-self but also provides opportunity for researchers to record and investigate people's daily behaviors through it. The central goal of the study is to understand people's daily life routine as well as how they use cellphone to communicate and interact with others. Compared with conventional methods such as diary method or experience sampling method, the study collected, visualized and analyzed logs of social media uses of thirty-five participants' cellphones for further interview. The results show that combining one's daily movement (including speed and location features) and apps usage timeline can help to discover routine patterns. The daily moving map and timeline of uses of apps shows both spatial and temporal regular patterns. In conclusion, daily activity data collected from new technology is believed to help social scientists to discover patterns in advance to develop in-depth questions for qualitative interviews.