Study: Usage patterns vary when people are not working.
(June 15, 2015) If
you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change.
Without a commute or workspace, it stands to reason, most people will make a
higher portion of their calls from home — and they might make fewer calls, too.
Now a study co-authored by MIT researchers shows that mobile
phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, precisely because
people’s communications patterns change when they are not working.
Indeed, using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for
their study, the researchers found that in the months following layoffs, the
total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51 percent
compared with working residents, and by 41 percent compared with all phone
users. The number of calls made by a newly unemployed worker to someone in the
town where they had worked fell by 5 percentage points, and even the number of
individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers
dropped by around 20 percent.